526 Jessica Yates over, Britain, probably co-operating with the USA, would build on wartime rocketry developments and start exploring the Solar System. The most well-known authors of this period were W. E. Johns, Patrick Moore, Angus MacVicar and Hugh Walters, and I should also mention Paul Berna’s Threshold of the Stars (France, 1954) and its sequel Continent in the Sky (1955), about a space station and lunar exploration. Johns, the creator of Biggles, wrote ten books about a traditional group of explorers – war hero, teenage son, eccentric professor and doctor – who make contact with Martians. Free of the Empire ethos which some have criticised in the Biggles books, the books are ‘ripping yarns’ and are also a vehicle for serious criticism of the arms race: in The Quest for the Perfect Planet (1961) the professor searches for a place to shelter refugees if Earth blows up. Patrick Moore, a popular astronomer, has published over twenty children’s SF novels, including Mission to Mars (1955); Angus MacVicar, Scottish novelist and scriptwriter, had some of his children’s SF, about the Lost Planet serialised on radio and children’s televi- sion in the 1950s – a series which has obvious messages about the Cold War; while Hugh Walters specialised in children’s SF, writing a single series about astronaut Chris Godfrey from 1957 to 1981. With their straightforward plots, incorruptible heroes and interna- tionalist ethos, Walters’s SF is the best of its kind and Britain’s nearest rival to Heinlein in terms of an unfolding vision of the future. The Tom Swift tradition of improbable tech- nology was continued in E. C. Eliott’s Kemlo series published from 1954 to 1963. During this period some fine literary fantasies, precursors of today’s ‘science fantasy’, were published by non-SF-genre authors. The plot of T. H. White’s The Master (1957) is familiar from James Bond thrillers: a mad scientist with mesmeric powers and a secret weapon plans to rule the world; two children accidentally trapped in his island fortress destroy him, thanks to their pet dog. The Little Prince [Le Petit Prince (1943)] is a unique classic fable, illustrated by its author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and other examples are Garry Hogg’s In the Nick of Time (1958) (inspired by J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment in Time), Meriol Trevor’s The Other Side of the Moon (1956) and Merlin’s Magic (1953) by ‘Helen Clare’ (Pauline Clarke) – a family treasure-hunt guided by Merlin and the god Mercury, with clues and adventures from literature and legend. Six children learn that the Tree of Imagination is threatened by hordes of robots, and they need Drake’s drum and Arthur’s sword to destroy them. With the most memorable British children’s SF of the period being actually ‘science fantasy’, the way of writing genre SF had to change. A radical shift away from ‘space opera’ was driven by new developments in adult SF and world politics. The influence of John Wyndham’s four great disaster novels in the Wellsian tradition, The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), on British children’s SF cannot be overestimated. Another vital influence was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which chimed in with Cold War fears about Soviet invasion and gave to children’s SF the motifs Escape from the City and the Forbidden Romance. With Nigel Kneale’s SF-horror Quatermass trilogy about alien inva- sions shown on television, the 1950s were an exciting, if doom-ridden time for the genre. In the new model of children’s SF, where some terrible, often irreversible disaster took civilisation back to the Dark Ages, historical, political and religious issues took centre- stage. Donald Suddaby is an important transitional figure, writing space stories (Prisoners of Saturn (1957)) and disaster fiction (The Death of Metal (1952)). David Severn’s The Future Took Us (1958) is a vital pivotal work, a chilling vision of post-holocaust Britain in AD 3000, where machines, especially the wheel, are banned by the ruling theocracy of Calculators.
Science fiction 527 John Christopher was the first British genre writer for children to emerge in the 1960s. His first juveniles, the Tripods trilogy – The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1967) and The Pool of Fire (1968) – are a tribute to H. G. Wells: suppose the Martians had won? His masterpiece is the Winchester trilogy: The Prince in Waiting (1970), Beyond the Burning Lands (1971) and The Sword of the Spirits (1972), in which man-made geological disasters have returned Britain to a medieval city-state culture guided by the Seers (who operate the remnants of technology pretending it is magic). The Guardians (1970) is probably the first to use Orwell’s motifs of the Escape from the City and the Forbidden Romance/friendship, in a world divided between the Conurbs and the Country. Empty World (1977) is about worldwide plague, and in A Dusk of Demons (1993) he reverts to the post-holocaust formula. Peter Dickinson wrote for adults first, and has written for the young in many genres. The Changes trilogy – The Weathermonger (1968), Heartsease (1969) and The Devil’s Children (1970) – is set in a future Britain where people hate machines and have reverted to superstition; The Devil’s Children is interesting as a positive view of an ethnic minority group (Sikhs) written shortly before educationalists began to make demands for such books. Dickinson has also used biological sciences to back his fiction, as in Eva (1988) when, after a car crash Eva’s brain is transplanted into a chimpanzee’s body. As the human race loses its will to live, the future may lie with the chimps. A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992) tells the parallel stories of a sea-ape girl, Li, four million years ago, and a palaeontologist excavating the African desert who finds her relics. Nicholas Fisk specialises in shorter SF for the under-thirteens: catchy titles like Antigrav (1978) indicate his approach. His work can be deceptively light-hearted when dealing with matters of life and death: for example, in Trillions (1971) when a fanatical general decides to use nuclear weapons to destroy the alien mineral ‘Trillions’. Grinny (1973) and its sequel You Remember Me! (1984) deal with alien invasion, while in A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair (1980) a nuclear accident causes the world’s birth-rate to fall, and scientists attempt to clone new humans. Louise Lawrence is Britain’s leading woman SF writer, and she confronts her teenage protagonists with inescapable moral choices, beginning with Andra (1971) and The Power of Stars (1972). Her next SF novels were published in the USA, and a fresh start came with Children of the Dust (1985), a powerful nuclear holocaust novel inspired by her chil- dren’s involvement with the peace movement. She followed it with a sequence of young adult (YA) SF novels on pollution, feminism, the dangers of technology, and human–alien love. Ben-Harran’s Castle (1992) is an Earth-on-trial story, and The Disinherited (1994) is an Escape/Forbidden Romance between a rich girl and poor boy when Britain is gripped by the ultimate energy crisis and the greenhouse effect. In Dreamweaver (1996) and The Crowlings (1999) Lawrence shows the culture clashes and potential for disaster caused by humankind settling on other planets. As we move from the 1970s to the 1980s and 1990s, several new trends are apparent. First, the development of the teenage novel from contemporary realism into other genres, entering children’s SF to produce teenage and YASF novels with serious romantic relation- ships and a more pessimistic view of world politics. Then the revival of anti-nuclear weapons protest in the early 1980s, in response to the fear of a new generation of nuclear weapons, prompted several outstanding prophetic novels about the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. Who, however, would have believed that at the onset of the 1990s we would see the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, the unification of Germany and development of liberal regimes in Eastern Europe?
528 Jessica Yates Third, authors who had specialised in other genres or for other age-groups, including writing for adults, turned to children’s or YASF, or science fantasy, either to play the prophet or simply to tell the story their creative talent demanded. Following the lead of Peter Dickinson, such authors include Lois Lowry, Bruce Brooks (No Kidding (1989)), Rosemary Harris (A Quest for Orion (1978), Tower of the Stars (1980)), Jan Mark (The Ennead (1978)), Robert Westall, Diana Wynne Jones, Annie Dalton, Ann Schlee (The Vandal (1979)), John Rowe Townsend (The Xanadu Manuscript (1977) and King Creature, Come (1980)) and Jill Paton Walsh (Torch (1987)), with fine trilogies by Jean Ure, Ann Halam and Terry Pratchett, a quartet by Catherine Fisher and a septet by John Marsden. Such quality writing sets a challenge to genre specialists. Moreover, authors now write about computers to match their real development as PCs, pocket machines and game consoles, instead of the way traditional SF used them, as enor- mous mainframes or shipboard computers. British-born Canadian emigrant Monica Hughes took advantage of new freedoms to make girls her leading characters, and did not share the British prejudice against space adventures. Her Isis trilogy (from The Keeper of the Isis Light (1980)) is a study in preju- dice and superstition with leading roles for girls, and in a lifetime’s writing, mainly in the SF genre, she warned against environmental catastrophe (Ring-rise, Ring-set (1982) and The Crystal Drop (1992)) and preached peace and reconciliation. Canadian-born Douglas Hill turned in mid-career to juvenile SF, writing new sagas in the Heinlein tradition with comic-book verve. The Last Legionary quintet (1979–82) features a near-invulnerable hero; the Huntsman trilogy (1982–4) is a post-holocaust, alien invasion series; and the ColSec trilogy (1984–5) features teenagers dispatched through space to colonise a new planet. From the 1970s the mood in the USA has been individualistic, breaking away from Heinleinian space opera. Outstanding examples have been Jay Williams’s Danny Dunn series; Laurence Yep’s Sweetwater (1973) set on a colonised planet; Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971) about laboratory rats with increased intelligence, and his feminist, post-holocaust Z for Zachariah (1975); and Virginia Hamilton’s trilogy about four children with psychic gifts, beginning with Justice and Her Brothers (1978). Sylvie Engdahl explored deep religious and philosophical questions with Enchantress from the Stars (1970) among others. H. M. Hoover sets most of her books on alien planets, backing her plots with anthropological research and frequently featuring girls in the lead: This Time of Darkness (1980) is an Escape from the City. William Sleator has written quirky tales about the disruption of reality and Pamela Sargent has written YASF novels with strong heroines, such as Earthseed (1983) and Alien Child (1988). Pamela Service has written in several genres: Under Alien Stars (1990) shows humans surviving alien domination. A powerful anger fuelled the writing of political YASF in Britain, reviving the Wyndhamesque disaster novel. Robert Swindells’s Brother in the Land (1984) describes survival after worldwide nuclear war; a new final chapter offers hope. Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel When the Wind Blows (1982) demonstrated the futility of civil defence as an uncomprehending elderly couple die of radiation sickness: it became an animated film. In Germany, Gudrun Pausewang published the grim, post-nuclear The Last Children (1988) (Die Letzen Kinder von Schewenborn (1983)). Dr Seuss followed up his wonderful graphic eco-fable The Lorax (1971) with the brinkmanship of The Butter Battle Book (1984). Civilisation is destroyed by plague in Jean Ure’s trilogy Plague 99/Plague (1989), Come Lucky April/After the Plague (1992) and Watchers at the Shrine (1994). The theme
Science fiction 529 is the sex war and women’s vengeance on male aggression which supposedly caused the plague. Robert Westall describes a stratified society in Futuretrack 5 (1983), an Escape/cross-class Romance, and in Urn Burial (1987) Earth is the battleground between Good cat-like aliens and Evil dog-aliens. Swindells’s Daz 4 Zoe (1990) varies the Forbidden Romance with its joint narrative, alternate chapters told by an upper-class girl, and a semi-literate boy from the fenced-off city. Robert Leeson tackles social injustice in his optimistic Time Rope quartet (1986). Religion is a frequent theme of adult SF: religious children’s SF includes Madeleine L’Engle’s series beginning with A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Starforce Red Alert (1983), a temptation story, and the third of Diane Duane’s Wizard series, High Wizardry (1990), in which Dairine discovers the wizard’s oath on a computer and chooses an outer-space mission where, again, the First Temptation is about to happen. SF motifs turn up in children’s picture books: But Martin! by June Counsel (1984), the Dr Xargle series by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, Michael Foreman’s Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish (1972), and the post-holocaust satirical Henry’s Quest by Graham Oakley (1986). The ever-popular Tintin had SF adventures: Destination Moon (1953), Explorers on the Moon (1954) and Flight 714 (1968), in which the team learn that aliens have observed Earth for centuries. The particular history of European immigration to Australasia, a continent with its unique fauna and landscape, already inhabited by people with a culture adapted over centuries to their environment, is probably responsible for certain recurring themes in antipodean children’s SF – the Unearthly Child and the Desert Landscape. We also find the perennial theme of the breakdown of civilisation, and remember that the well-known adult novel about the end of the human race after nuclear holocaust, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), was set in Australia. Notable SF novels of the late twentieth century by antipodean authors include Alan Baillie’s Megan’s Star (1988) and Magician (1992), Joan Phipson’s Dinko (1985) and Lee Harding’s Displaced Person (1979), an original story about a boy who gradually becomes invisible to the rest of the world, losing his senses of colour, hearing and touch until he is trapped in a grey limbo. Robin Klein’s Halfway across the Galaxy and Turn Left (1985) is rare in its explicitly humorous intent. An alien family on the run from their home planet Zyrgon hide on Earth and are surprised and delighted by aspects of our culture, such as real food instead of ‘compressed food slabs’. Margaret Mahy’s Aliens in the Family (1986) also features aliens researching humankind. A youth is set a test to bring information back to his interstellar school to form part of the great inventory of universal knowledge. Caroline Macdonald’s The Lake at the End of the World (1988), set in 2025, relates in alternate sections the experiences of a boy and girl after the breakdown of urban civilisa- tion and possibly the near-extinction of the human race. Gillian Rubinstein has written some outstanding YASF novels. Beyond the Labyrinth (1988) tells of an alien researching Earth customs; in Galax-Arena (1992) Earth children are kidnapped to perform circus feats on an alien planet; Space Demons (1986) begins a fascinating trilogy where sequels Skymaze (1989) and Shinkei (1996) appeared in response to fanmail. Some Australian teenagers test-drive new computer games from Japan and are drawn into cyberspace, risking being trapped there for ever if they cannot solve the game. Finally, John Marsden’s powerful septet, opening with Tomorrow, when the War Began (1993), about a teenage guerrilla group in an invaded Australia, is a passionate, compelling saga.
530 Jessica Yates Science fantasy is a label bookshops use for their adult SF/fantasy section. I am using it to describe SF combining technology with outright magic, in a present, future or alien setting. My examples are entertaining, often raising deep philosophical issues, and finely written, usually by fantasy specialists. Diana Wynne Jones’s A Tale of Time City (1987) employs the Time Patrol concept, Hexwood (1993) role-playing games. Annie Dalton’s The Alpha Box (1991) combines Greek legends, rock music and an alien threat. Jane Yolen’s Dragon trilogy (1982–7) mixes the SF idea of breeding alien creatures to fight in gaming pits with the telepathy the hero and heroine share with their dragons. Ann Halam’s Inland trilogy (The Daymaker (1987), Transformations (1988), The Skybreaker (1990)) depicts a future where the scientific way of life has collapsed and humankind has developed complementary magical powers. Women supervise in harmony with nature, but magic only works as long as people don’t turn back to machines and electricity. Finally I list some of the best-received children’s and YASF of the last ten years: space opera by Ben Jeapes (His Majesty’s Starship (1998) Winged Chariot (1999) and The Xenocide Mission (2002)); environmental disasters from Lesley Howarth (Weather Eye (1995) and Ultraviolet (2001)) and Julie Bertagna (Exodus (2002)); time-travel to AD 2032 from Malorie Blackman (Thief! (1995)). We have secret science, thriller-SF: Terence Blacker’s The Angel Factory (2001) and Malcolm Rose’s Clone (2002); a space colony from Earth underestimating the small furry-skinned natives in Brian Caswell’s Deucalion (1995), and various future dystopias. In Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide (1999) London is ruined and run by gangs; in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2001) mobile cities are preda- tors, at least a thousand years ahead from now. Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses (2001) gives the Forbidden Romance a fresh twist: not just class separates the boy and girl, but race, and in this alternative Earth, black people – Crosses – are the dominant race, white people – Noughts – are inferior. Lois Lowry writes of enclosed communities in Gathering Blue (2002), about a gifted female artist who needs to express and fulfil herself, and most superbly in The Giver (1993), winner of the Newbery Medal, about a totalitarian community which has banned colours, history and memory and promotes a false sense of happiness. Inevitably the teenage hero rebels. Terry Pratchett has written two fine comic trilogies: Truckers (1989–90), about tiny people, ‘nomes’, struggling to survive on Earth, having forgotten they came from space; and the Johnny Maxwell series (1992–5) about a boy who gets caught up inside a computer game and also goes time-travelling. Humour lies in the leading characters’ comments on human society seen from the outside. Children’s SF, embracing YASF and science fantasy, presents today a mature body of work both by lifelong practitioners and by authors ‘moonlighting’ from other genres, and including many award-winners. Typically recycling a small number of plotlines, it is overall more optimistic than adult SF. SF comics and action films continue to be popular, so the genre has the potential to entice reluctant readers, as well as the intellectual content to engage committed readers, and the quality of current writing stands up well against current children’s fantasy and history genres. References Clute, J. and Nicholls, P. (eds) (1993) The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, 2nd edn, London: Orbit. Donelson, K. (1978) ‘Nancy, Tom and Assorted Friends in the Stratemeyer Syndicate Then and Now’, Children’s Literature 7: 17–44. Fortune Magazine (1934/1969) ‘For It Was Indeed He’, in Egoff, S., Stubbs, G. T. and Ashley, L. F. (eds) Only Connect, Toronto, Oxford University Press.
Science fiction 531 Gifford, D. (1984) The International Book of Comics, London: Hamlyn. Green, R. L. (1962/1969/1980) ‘The Golden Age of Children’s Books’, in Egoff, S., Stubbs, G. T. and Ashley, L. F. (eds) Only Connect, 2nd edn, Toronto, Oxford University Press. Orwell, G. (1940/1968) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 1. An Age like This 1920–1940, ed. Orwell, S. and Angus, A., London: Secker and Warburg; Harmondsworth: Penguin. Turner, E. S. (1975) Boys Will Be Boys, 3rd edn, London: Joseph. Further reading Aldiss, B. W. (1986) Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, London: Gollancz. Egoff, S. (1981) Thursday’s Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children’s Literature, Chicago: American Library Association. James, E. (ed) (1997) Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction, 70. Mendlesohn, F. (ed) (2003) Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction, 88. Nodelman, P. (1985) ‘Out There in Children’s Science Fiction: Forward into the Past’, Science Fiction Studies 12: 285–96. Reid, S. E. (1998) Presenting Young Adult Science Fiction, New York: Twayne. Sullivan, C. W. (ed.) (1999) Young Adult Science Fiction, Westport: Greenwood Press.
41 Series fiction Victor Watson A series is a sequence of narratives, published separately, often over a considerable period of time, mostly about the same characters, and usually written by one author. Series fictions have traditionally been loosely grouped generically as ballet stories, pony stories, school stories, holiday adventure stories, family stories, and so on. These groupings are convenient, but their use has been misleading, giving rise to the impression that series fiction is by its very nature formulaic, repetitive and unworthy of serious critical attention. It also fails to take account of the many series which cannot be made to sit comfortably within such groups. For example, in Antonia Forest’s Marlow series of twelve novels, four are school stories, two are holiday adventure stories, two are historical novels, and the rest defy categorisation. It would be similarly misleading to label Madeleine L’Engle’s series which began with A Wrinkle in Time as straightforwardly science fiction, or Monica Edwards’ two series as just pony stories. Towards a taxonomy There have been at least 300 series for children published in English alone; many of them have been out of print for years, some are entirely forgotten. Nevertheless, it is likely that the most important continuous reading children do on their own is the reading of series – and this is to some extent acknowledged by the thousands of adult readers who continue to belong to societies dedicated to the celebration of the favourite series-writers of their childhood. Yet, in spite of the fact that series fiction played such a major part in children’s reading throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the academic world has been mostly content to accept a number of simplistic critical assumptions about its nature and value. In the face of such a vast and volatile subject, it is helpful to bear in mind that only two formal features distinguish a series from other kinds of fiction – its extended overall length and its composition in separate narratives. The crucial factor for both the writer and reader of series fiction is the relationship between the entire sequence and the indi- vidual novels. On that basis, series fictions can be divided into two types, the progressive and the successive. All series fiction is either progressive or successive, though there are a few rare cases where an author has shifted a series from one category to the other. A progressive series is one in which a continuous and developing story is told in instal- ments, each book telling a different part of a sequential narrative, with the characters growing older and more mature. The novels in a progressive series have their own place in the developing narrative and should ideally be read in the correct order. The role of the separate books is to provide a readerly and writerly breathing space and to shape the
Series fiction 533 continuity of experience as a series of significant episodes or stages. The Harry Potter series belongs to this category: it is generally understood that the author’s aim is to write an extended narrative in seven separate parts, each corresponding to a year of Harry’s experience at Hogwarts School. The Narnia series is another, in which The Last Battle is not just the seventh instalment of an extended chronicle but the overall closure. Since a series of novels provides a writer with space, amplitude and extended opportunities for representing the development of character, maturation is often a predominant theme. The North American family sagas popular between around 1860 and 1920 (L. M. Montgomery’s Avonlea novels, L. M. Alcott’s Little Women quartet, and Susan Coolidge’s Katy trilogy) are progressive series, since the main interest is the growth of the protagonists from child- hood to parenthood. Another progressive series is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series (from 1932): in the first, Laura makes her appearance as a child, and the series tells of her experience at first with her pioneering family and finally as an independent young woman. Similarly, the Australian author Mary Grant Bruce, in the fifteen novels which comprise the Billabong series (from 1910), traces the changes in the life of her protago- nists Jim and Norah before, during and after the First World War. However, many progressive series remain open-ended and could, at least in theory, still be developed further; for example, in the Marlow series by Antonia Forest, the last published novel, Run away Home, is not a final closure and new titles could be added. A successive series is one in which the characters show few signs of growing older or changing in any significant way. This does not necessarily mean that there is little authorial interest in characterisation, only that development and maturation are not a primary concern. The characters in a successive series may be subtly represented, with a great sense of depth and complexity: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (from 1930) is a successive series and the characters show few signs of sexual or social growth. However, they do change and grow more experienced, and the series is held together as much by them, and by the numerous small dramatic moments which matter to them, as by its themes of boating, exploration and camping. The works in most successive series may be read in any order, since none is critically dependent upon its place in the sequence. There may be brief references in one novel to the events in one published earlier; such references lightly suggest a chronology of events but have little structural significance and serve mainly as signposts (or, indeed, advertisements) for readers unfamiliar with the series. The William Brown stories are a successive series, and so are most of the series by Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville. Most of the hundreds of series for younger readers – such as the Thomas the Tank Engine series by the British writer the Reverend W. Awdry (from 1945), and the Topsy and Tim series begun in 1959 by Jean and Gareth Adamson – are successive series. The paradoxical task for their authors is to provide narrative (often domestic) action while at the same time suggesting a world of unchanging childhood security. However, some series which have begun as early readers for very young children have matured along with their protagonists: the eponymous heroine of the Katie Morag picture books (from 1984), by the Scottish author Mairi Hedderwick, grows older as the series progresses, her develop- ment mirrored by the changes that take place on the Hebridean island which is her home. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series (from 1940) is also progressive: the principal characters meet on Betsy’s fifth birthday and the later stories take her through her adoles- cence in Minnesota to her marriage in the final volume. Fantasy series whose narratives are tied in with a quest structure are invariably progres- sive and their extended length enables the author to accumulate incrementally the
534 Victor Watson geographical, historical and cultural complexity of vast secondary worlds. They should perhaps be thought of as epic series. The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (from 1964) is a distinguished example, as are Catherine Fisher’s two series, the Book of the Crow series (from 1993) and the Snow-Walker series (from 1998). Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (from 1995) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series seem to have encouraged a number of writers around the turn of the century to begin their own secondary world series – they include William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer (from 2000), Cliff McNish’s Doomspell (from 2000) and Katherine Roberts’ Echorium Sequence (from 1999). However, there are other famous and prolonged fantasy series which are successive – L. Frank Baum’s Oz series (continued after his death by other ‘royal histo- rians’ of Oz) is shaped not by a single unifying quest but by a sequence of separate visits to the fantasy land of Oz; and the Doctor Dolittle series by Hugh Lofting (from 1922) is held together more by the Doctor’s character and idealism than by a developing quest or single adventure. A variant of the epic fantasy is the eco-series, such as Colin Dann’s Farthing Wood series (from 1979) and the swashbuckling stories in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series (from 1986). There are series in which the main unifying feature is not a character or group of char- acters but a place or an institution. This – particularly in Britain – is most frequently a school, as in the Greyfriars stories by Charles Hamilton, which appeared in comics, annuals and novels from 1908 until the post-war years; or the six Malory Towers titles by Enid Blyton (from 1946); or, more famously, the Chalet School stories (from 1925) by Elinor Brent-Dyer, comprising fifty-eight volumes about a school which, despite having to change location a number of times during the Second World War, retained its pacifist and non-denominational unity. However, the unifying place might also be a house, as in the Green Knowe series by Lucy Boston (from 1954). All these series have a uniquely colle- giate quality, and what distinguishes them is a strong sense of a community of people who spend a good deal of their time in this place and whose lives are significantly shaped by its character. A classic example of a collegiate series is William Mayne’s Choir School novels (from 1955) in which the cathedral is more than just a setting but has its own unique character and history which shapes the children’s and teachers’ lives; Gene Kemp’s Cricklepit Combined School series (from 1977) shows that an ordinary contemporary state school, with little history and no glamour, can nevertheless have a collegiate and benevolent character of its own. Ballet stories – and career stories in general – have a unique celebratory character and appeal mostly to a specific readership. They are mostly progressive series, following the careers of a single character or group of characters from childhood to professional success in adult life; the best-known example is Lorna Hill’s Sadler’s Wells series (from 1950). Ballet stories may also have a collegiate flavour, in that both the action and the ethos are shaped by a dancing school or a group of performers. Like much series fiction, ballet stories not infrequently turn into moral fables, love stories or thrillers; but what unites them is their authentic representation of various kinds of passionate dedication to a personal ideal or ambition. The many British series of pony stories also have a habit of turning into other kinds of fiction, but, like ballet stories, they have their own distinctive flavour – a unique yearning and celebratory quality to which millions of young readers have responded. Horse stories in the United States and Australia, though different from British pony stories in setting and readership, take for granted in their readers a similar romantic interest in animals as well as a passion for wild countryside settings. Two excel- lent examples of these are the series by Mary O’Hara, set in Wyoming, which began with
Series fiction 535 My Friend Flicka (1941), and the Silver Brumby series of ten novels (1958–96) by the Australian writer Elyne Mitchell. Finally, there are the publishers’ format series. These consist of works, often written by a syndicate of authors, bound together by theme, characters or genre, and marketed as a recognisable commodity with its own brand features. There are purists who believe that their appeal is ephemeral, that their literary significance is minimal, and that they are not series fictions at all but other kinds of fiction disguised as series. Nevertheless, the disguise is often very effective, for a format series may aspire to the conditions of either the progressive or the successive series, and they frequently take on many of the features of the collegiate series. Format series have a long history: in 1904 The Bobbsey Twins were created by Edward Stratemeyer under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope; in 1927 the first of the Hardy Boys series was published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and in 1930 the same syndicate published the first of the phenomenally popular Nancy Drew. Among the most popular current format series are the Point series, covering several genres – Point Horror, Point Crime, Point Romance, Point SF, and others. The British Animal Ark series (from 1994), though written by several different authors, appears under the name of ‘Lucy Daniels’ and successfully achieves narrative unity by means of its veterinary theme and consistent charac- terisation. The American Sweet Valley High series (from 1984) is also written by a team of writers, appearing under the name of ‘Kate William’, the story outlines drafted by Francine Pascal, the series creator. A distinguished forerunner of the format series was Lucy Fitch Perkins’ Twins series, in which all the stories were concerned with twins in different coun- tries and at different historical periods. This series began in 1911, was continued by other writers after Perkins’ death, and remained in print for many decades. Resistance to taxonomies However, the difficulty in applying a taxonomy of this kind to such a fluid and volatile phenomenon is the subjects’ resistance to categorisation. This is partly because there is an ambiguity of purpose latent in all series fictions: their desire to provide readers with more of the same and simultaneously to tell a new story. Series readers desire closures but fear termination. Furthermore, while they appear predictable, series fictions are often intrinsi- cally volatile. The principal reason for this is that authors, readers and the narratives themselves are uniquely affected by time. A series may be written over a period of many years, perhaps covering most of a writer’s professional life. In that time the authorial interest is likely to change direction and the later writing will be done with a consciousness of public feedback. Any series fiction, therefore, might shift from one kind to another in the course of its progress. An example is Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series: there is a case for believing that the early novels in the series comprise a progressive sequence on the character of George and her relationship with her father, but that the subsequent succes- sive stories were written in response to their enormous popular appeal. Authors after completion have been known to write additional works, either to fill in narrative gaps (as L. M. Montgomery did with the Avonlea stories, quite properly calling the new titles ‘Chronicles’) or as major ideological reappraisals (as Ursula Le Guin has done with the Earthsea sequence). Because a series is written and published over a long period of time, there are conse- quences for readers too. Reading any completed series from beginning to end provides a sense of prolonged and incremental intimacy with the main characters, and a crucial sense of change and development over an extended period of time, intensified through the slow
536 Victor Watson accumulation of linear narrative. However, for readers of a current series there is an addi- tional factor: they cannot complete the narrative at their own pace but must wait for further instalments to be provided. This waiting – with its accompaniment of shared and excited anticipation, marketing publicity, literary awards, film adaptations and journalistic speculation – becomes part of the reception process. A more integral difficulty is the mismatch between fictional time and real time. The twenty titles in Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine series were issued between 1943 and 1978, a period involving considerable social and cultural change; but the fictional time is no more than four or five years. In the foreword to Not Scarlet but Gold (1962), the fourteenth title in the series, Saville explained to his readers that he had decided to address two diffi- culties at once – maturation and the passing of time: it is now time for the David and Peter [Petronella] of the first story, published nearly twenty years ago, to behave as if they are sixteen today. So now, at last … these char- acters are facing their adventures – and indeed each other – as if they were living in the 1960s. In effect, Saville was changing the series from the successive to the progressive. In prac- tice, though, many authors have a way of sidestepping this difficulty: they allow fictional time to pass extremely slowly and social changes of setting to slip unobtrusively into their narratives. One author explicitly drew her readers’ attention to both the difficulty and the solution: Antonia Forest pointed out in a prefatory note to The Thuggery Affair (1965) that in the seventeen years since the first in the Marlow series had been written only eighteen months of fictional time had passed; she explained that the only way of dealing with this problem was to give each story a background more or less consistent with the year in which it was written. Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit series for younger readers was written over such an extended period of time (almost half a century, 1929–75) that its details of country life (fetching water, using candles) required in later editions an explanatory historical preface. Just as much of the best of children’s fiction addresses matters without appearing to mention them, some of the greatest series fictions for children have a complex thematic circularity, or a mercurial coherence, while seeming only to fit within one of the accepted categories. Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman sequence, for example, outwits the serial nature of series fiction. Despite the linearity of its progressive narrative in six of the seven novels, the series is expansive and inclusive. Its authorial attention circles around a particular group of people, back in time in The Runner, and out into other families and communi- ties; but Dicey remains the centre, the series beginning with her and returning to her at the end. Mary Norton’s Borrowers series – while appearing to be a simple linear fiction moving in one narrative direction – in fact constitutes a complex fictional exploration of the loneliness and yearning which lie thematically at the centre of the author’s fictional world. Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series is another example: this series is held together by far more than a house or its inhabitants for – despite the elegiac sense of a world in decline and an environment continually being destroyed – the novels convey a celebratory conviction that we are all capable of imaginatively transcending time. Critical approaches Critical approaches to children’s series fiction have been confused and inconsistent. One view has distinguished series where subsequent works are mainly formulaic and repetitive
Series fiction 537 from those where from the outset the author perceived and planned the series as an artistic whole. A similar distinction is sometimes made between popular and literary series (between, say, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series); but the two terms are problematic, shifting and culturally loaded, and not necessarily mutually exclusive anyway. Critics with an educational perspective are generally more welcoming, since they regard series fiction in terms of the ways in which it can help young people to become sophisticated readers: familiar and predictable characters ease an inexperienced reader into what might otherwise have been a daunting new narrative, formulaic plots teach prediction skills, and the business of collecting all the titles may well be an important step in becoming a serious reader. However, series fiction has suffered less from biased criticism than from neglect. Often the first work in a series has been given some critical attention and its sequels merely listed or summarised. Such perfunctory treatment implies that to follow a successful novel with a sequel is a loss of writerly seriousness, a decline into repetitive and formulaic spin-offs. But that is not how a series is experienced by its readers: if they found the sequels less inter- esting than the first story, they would stop reading them. The best series fictions are not simply strings of pot-boiling sequels; they involve a good deal of serious commitment on the part of both the writer and the reader. Deciding to read all the novels in a series implies a commitment and involves a special relationship which the reader has made a conscious decision to sustain. There is an implied promise made by a series-writer, and a recognition of the readerly desires of young readers. J. K. Rowling’s understanding of this desire and of her responsibility to keep the implied authorial promise partly explains the success of the Harry Potter series. And, like the best of the great series-authors, she knows how to keep that promise without being strait-jacketed by it – each sequel taking both her own writing and the reader’s reading into deeper narratorial levels of interest and reflection. In the past, critics and reviewers rarely took the trouble to read an entire series; certainly those who suggested, for example, that the only novel worth reading in the Anne of Green Gables series is the first had probably not themselves read the last – Rilla of Ingleside (1921), a dark and impressively convincing ‘home front’ novel set during the First World War. However, there has been an improvement in recent years: David Rudd’s exemplary study of the series fictions of Enid Blyton has demonstrated the value of detailed and attentive critical study of such extended narratives. History Series fiction began in North America when James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers was published in 1823, the first of the Leather-Stocking Tales. For younger readers there was the monumental Rollo sequence of twenty-eight stories by Jacob Abbott, the first a picture book for three-year-old beginner readers, and later titles taking the young man on a tour of Europe; this progressive series was published between 1835 and 1864 and assumed a readership which would grow up alongside the fictional protagonist. Family series fiction began in 1864 when Sophie May published the first of the Little Prudy series, and in the following year the first of the Dotty Dimple stories. North American readers were indeed fortunate at that period: in 1867 Martha Finley, under the pseudonym Martha Farquharson, published the first of her Elsie Dinsmore books, a series of twenty-eight titles which, between 1867 and 1905, traced the life of the eponymous heroine from the time she was eight until she was a widowed grandmother. Then, in 1868 and 1869, Louisa May Alcott published Little Women and Little Women Part II (known in
538 Victor Watson Britain as Good Wives), to begin one of the most famous and influential series of novels (strictly speaking, a quartet) ever written for young readers. Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did and its two sequels followed (1872–86), and then the Five Little Pepper series of twelve family stories (from 1881) by Margaret Sidney (Harriet M. Lothrop); in 1903 the first of Kate Douglas Wiggin’s three Rebecca stories was published – Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – and Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna appeared in 1913, followed by a number of popular sequels by Porter and, after her death, by Harriet Lumis Smith and others. A major problem for the authors of the family sagas was to avoid representing growing up as a diminishing of dramatic interest. The limit of their exploration of their characters was sex: they took their heroines to courtship and marriage, then they either left them there, or turned their attention to the next generation of children. The only family saga of the period to address these difficulties was Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, by L. M. Montgomery (1908–21). Montgomery faced the challenge directly: would this vivid child, like so many others, vanish into the unspoken mysteries of womanhood? In fact, the series matures into a moving account of Anne’s transformation into a wife and mother, representing with considerable power the depth of her love (and grief) for her children. Montgomery was interested in the form and nature of series fiction itself, and its ability to adapt to the changing world: Rilla of Ingleside, while not exactly metafictive, does ques- tion the assumptions implicit in the earlier novels of the series, especially the value placed upon the centrality of joyous imagination in a world transformed by war into hideousness. This period also saw the appearance in the USA of other kinds of series fiction. In 1895 Annie Fellows Jonston published the first of the Little Colonel series, and The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls – and a ‘Golliwogg’ appeared – the first of the famous Anglo-American Golliwogg series by Florence K. and Bertha Upton. In 1900 Gelett Burgess’ Goops and How to Be Them appeared, the first of his series about the balloon-headed Goops, and in the same year L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In 1904 the Bobbsey Twins were created by Edward Stratemeyer, and the first of Joseph Altsheler’s popular series about the French and Indian Wars appeared in 1916. In 1918 a book entitled Raggedy Ann Stories was issued, first of the Raggedy Ann books written and illustrated by Johnny (Barton) Gruelle. Series began to appear in worldwide profusion. In Australia, Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and how They Grew had appeared in 1881, followed by eleven further titles, and in 1910 Mary Grant Bruce wrote the first of the fifteen novels in the Billabong series. In Britain in 1899, E. Nesbit published The Story of the Treasure Seekers, followed by two novels and a related collection of short stories; Five Children and It followed in 1902, the first of the Psammead stories. In Britain, a great outpouring of popular school series began in 1919 when Elsie J. Oxenham published A Go-Ahead Schoolgirl, and her Abbey School books (around forty titles) began to appear in 1920. The Senior Prefect by Dorita Fairlie Bruce (renamed Dimsie Goes to School), first of a series of ten, was published in 1921. In 1923 she launched a new series of nine novels with The Girls of St Bride’s. The most long- lasting of all the school series, however, was the monumental Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer, a total of fifty-eight novels published between 1925 and 1970. Enid Blyton – queen of series-writers – wrote the first of her St Clare’s School stories in 1941 and Malory Towers followed in 1946. The first of Anthony Buckeridge’s twenty-five Jennings books appeared in 1950. Ronald Searle was involved in two school series of a different kind: the first was his inspired and parodic St Trinians! series (from 1948) and the second was Geoffrey Willans’ Molesworth series, illustrated by Searle, which began with Down with Skool (1953).
Series fiction 539 In the period between the wars, many series spilled over into, or from, comics (Billy Bunter) and film (Tarzan). Meanwhile other popular and innovative series began to appear: the first of Hugh Lofting’s twelve Doctor Dolittle books appeared in the USA in 1920 and in Britain in 1922; the first of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories was published in 1922; and in 1932 The Camels Are Coming – first of what was to become the Biggles series – appeared in an aeronautical magazine, Popular Flying, established by the author, Captain W. E. Johns. In 1932 Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods was published, Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm stories began in 1933, P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins in 1934, and Margot Pardoe’s Bunkle series in 1939. In the USA, the Stratemeyer Syndicate released The Tower Treasure in 1927, first of the Hardy Boys series by ‘F. W. Dixon’; Nancy Drew made her first appearance three years later in The Secret of the Old Clock. It was a prolific period in the history of children’s books. When Swallows and Amazons appeared in 1930, the first of a series of twelve, Arthur Ransome’s unpretentious and unhurried story of camping and sailing initiated what amounted to a new genre in Britain which expressed for many – both children and adults – a resurgent love of the British countryside and a desire to explore it. Between 1930 and 1960 camping and tramping fiction – alongside school stories – dominated children’s reading in Britain, covering between them the whole school year. Their writers caught the national enthusiasm for hiking, cycling, exploring and boating, and created narratives celebrating the appeal of the (mainly) English land- and sea-scape. There were popular series (largely forgotten except by adult enthusiasts) by M. E. Atkinson, Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, Malcolm Saville, Garry Hogg, Aubrey de Selincourt, Elizabeth Kyle, Elinor Lyon, David Severn, Marjorie Lloyd and many others. The pony story – a close relative of the camping and tramping story – made its first significant appearance in series form shortly after the war: Ruby Ferguson’s Jill series began in 1949, and Monica Edwards’ two related and overlap- ping series, the Punchbowl Farm and the Romney Marsh series, ran to more than twenty titles, written over twenty years from 1947. These series were predicated on a belief in the intelligence and good nature of children, and their ability to cooperate; when Erich Kästner wrote the series which began with Emil und die Detektive (1929), he created an urban equivalent set in the streets of Berlin; after the war, Paul Berna’s Le Cheval sans tête (1955) began a series set on the streets of Paris. The 1940s and 1950s were dominated in Britain by two writers, Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville, who matched each other’s output series for series. Blyton – whose work excelled in terms of sales and reputation – is best known for the Famous Five and Secret Seven series (from 1942 and 1949); Saville – whose work showed a more serious interest in both landscape and characterisation – was particularly popular for the Lone Pine series (from 1943). The phenomenal output of both these authors was multiplied by the massive growth in paperback sales that took place at that time. It was partly because of the sheer volume of series production, and its association with cheap paperbacks, that series fiction began to be perceived by teachers, librarians and many parents as formulaic and trivial. In the USA things were different: short family series of very high quality were appearing which consciously addressed thoughtful and literary readers, not infrequently acknowl- edging the influence of E. Nesbit. In 1941 Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays appeared, the first of four stories about the Melendy family; in the same year the first of the Moffat series by Eleanor Estes; in 1954 Half Magic, by Edward Eager, first of a series of seven; and in 1956 A Lemon and a Star, by E. C. Spykman, first of the series about the Cares family. In 1957 Elizabeth Enright began a second series, the Gone-Away Lake books.
540 Victor Watson Then followed a fruitful period in which new authors began to challenge the perceived blandness of Blyton’s overwhelming output. In 1948 the first of Antonia Forest’s outstanding Marlow series appeared; in 1949 Willard Price’s popular action-packed Adventure series began with Amazon Adventure, and Geoffrey Trease published the first of the Bannermere stories; Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books (from 1945) were first trans- lated into English in 1950. It was a time of great innovation, exemplified by C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (from 1950), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (from 1952), Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (from 1954) and Henry Treece’s Viking’s Dawn (1955), the first of a trilogy. Two popular science-fiction series appeared in the USA – the Lucky Star series under the pseudonym Paul French (Isaac Asimov) in 1953, and in 1954 The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, first of a series of tales of space travel by the distinguished author Eleanor Cameron. In 1958, the Australian writer Elyne Mitchell published The Silver Brumby, first of a series of ten, and the following year saw the English translation of the first Mrs Pepperpot story by the Norwegian writer Alf Prøysen. Among the many series for younger readers there were Dorothy Edwards’ My Naughty Little Sister (from 1951) and the Clever Polly series by Catherine Storr (from 1955). In the 1960s several series were initiated which were to dominate children’s fiction for three decades, particularly fantasy, science fiction and comic history. In 1959, the first of the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp had been released, and in 1960 Madeleine L’Engle published Meet the Austins, first of a series which included the award-winning A Ring of Endless Light (1980). In 1962, she published A Wrinkle in Time, the first of her distinguished and complex series about the Murry and O’Keefe families. In India the first of the thirty-five Feluda detective series by Satyajit Ray appeared in 1961. Joan Aiken’s James III series began in 1962 and Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain appeared in 1964. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series began in 1965 with the publication of Over Sea, under Stone; in Australia, Bottersnikes and Gumbles, the first of the series created by S. A. Wakefield, appeared in 1967; and the same year saw the first of the Amar Chitra Katha comics series by Anant Pai, based on Indian culture, mythology and history. The Wizard of Earthsea – the first of what was to become Ursula Le Guin’s great fantasy, now a quintet – was published in 1968. In the closing years of the twentieth century there was no lessening of the range and variety of series fiction. K. M. Peyton’s Pennington series began in 1970, and in the same year the first of Barbara Willard’s historical Mantlemass series was published. More recent history was addressed in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), first of Judith Kerr’s Out of the Hitler Time trilogy; in Joan Lingard’s Kevin and Sadie series (from 1972) about the troubles in Northern Island; and in No Gun for Asmir (1993), first of a series by the Australian author Christobel Mattingley, about a Bosnian boy caught up in civil war. The Diamond Brothers stories – parodic thrillers which defy categorisation – began with The Falcon’s Malteser (1986) by Anthony Horowitz. Several notable female protagonists made their appearances in series fiction at this time: they include the eponymous heroines of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona (from 1968), Helen Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping, originally commissioned by BBC TV for Jackanory in 1972, Penny Pollard (from 1983) by the Australian author Robin Klein, Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series (from 1985), and – for younger readers – Dick King-Smith’s Sophie series (from 1988). Francesca Lia Block’s five postmodern Dangerous Angels fairy tales (from 1989) – set around Los Angeles about the adolescent Weetzie and her friends – were more controversial. In the age of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, fantasy currently seems to be in the ascendancy in series fiction. Trilogies abound. However, even before these two remarkable
Series fiction 541 publishing successes, fantasy had become more subversive, inventive and creatively mischievous, ignoring the boundaries which defined history, fantasy, comedy and science fiction. None better illustrates this than Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series (from 1977), which triumphantly challenges the usual expectations of series readers. In 1983 Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard, the first of her Young Wizards series, combined in a totally original way elements of myth, fantasy and science fiction. Explanations – and narrative demonstrations – of space travel and relativity were central to Russell Stannard’s Uncle Albert series (from 1989). The Mennyms (1993), by Sylvia Waugh, introduced a troubling new series in which stories of the adventures of a family of rag dolls allegorically raised deep philosophical and religious questions. The Obernewtyn Chronicles (from 1987), a series of four novels by the Australian writer Isobelle Carmody, are futuristic post-holocaust narratives, and another distinguished Australian series began with John Marsden’s Tomorrow, when the War Began, a sequence of novels about seven young adults fighting for survival when their country is invaded. The key to understanding the appeal of series fiction lies in the appreciation of endings. A series is not simply an extremely long serial; it is a sequence of narratives each with its own closure, providing points of completeness while allowing for the renewal of acquaintance with familiar much-loved characters and situations. Writers, however, may not necessarily share their readers’ enthusiasm for extended continuity: L. M. Alcott, rounding off the last of her quartet about the March family, famously admitted that it was ‘a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earth- quake’. Subsequent and contemporary authors, however, have shown no signs of such weariness and the appetites of readers remain unappeased. There is no end to the writing of series fiction. Further reading Ang, S. (2002) The Master of the Rings: Inside the World of J. R. R. Tolkien, Cambridge: Wizard Books. Auchmuty, R. (1992) A World of Girls, London: Women’s Press. Cadogan, M. and Craig, P. (1976) You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’ Fiction from 1939–1975, London: Gollancz. Campbell, A. and Gibbons, D. (1998) Outstanding Sequence Stories, Swansea: Librarians of Institu- tions and Schools of Education. Donaldson, S. R. (1986) Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, Kent: Kent State Libraries. Donelson, K. (1978) ‘Nancy, Tom and Assorted Friends in the Stratemeyer Syndicate Then and Now’, Children’s Literature 7: 17–44. Moss, E. (1976) ‘On the Tail of the Seductive Horse’, Signal 19: 27–30. Reynolds, K. (1990) Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain 1880–1910, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Watson, V. (2000) Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp, London: Routledge- Falmer.
42 Teenage fiction Realism, romances, contemporary problem novels Julia Eccleshare The demarcation of reading by age is always a tricky one, perhaps especially so when it comes to teenage fiction. What is at issue is not so much the teenage of the reader as the teenage or ‘young adulthood’ of the characters. The expectation is that teenagers should read about the things that they themselves are doing, or would enjoy doing if only they could, while making sure that they are not ‘corrupted’ by anything too adult or explicit. Impelled by the widespread anxiety that teenagers may abandon reading in favour of entertainment from other, easier-to-access media, teenage fiction has evolved as the most narcissistic of all fictions as, in its current form at least, it seems primarily directed towards mirroring society rather than asking questions of it. The bulk of what is written for teenagers charts changing social and moral codes and in doing so offers assurance about ways of behaving or being treated. But this can be a narrowing and claustrophobic defini- tion, and the obsession with veracity can all too often mean that teenagers are depicted as demons of destruction and revolt rather than in a more rounded way. It also takes away from the chance for teenagers to read more optimistically and to change their reading tastes so that they shift from childhood perceptions and interests to adult ones. In his recent book, The Child That Books Built (2002), Francis Spufford describes some of the changes that occur in the move from children’s to adult books in the following way. Fiction recomplicates itself for you: you step up a whole level of complexity. Suddenly you are surrounded anew by difficulties and riches commensurate with your state of mind. From an exhausted territory, you have come to an unexplored one, where manners and conventions are all to find, just like the rules of your own new existence in your own new lurch-prone adolescent body. (2002: 10) It is in making that shift both as people and readers that teenagers become a particular category. The immediacy of what matters to them is different from what matters to the children they have left behind or the adults they will become. The concept of young adults as a separate group to be addressed and instructed was put forward by the educationalist Sarah Trimmer as long ago as 1802. She drew a dividing line at fourteen and suggested that ‘young adulthood’ should last until twenty-one. As far as publishing specifically for that readership was concerned no direct action was taken, but writers wrote for them naturally, seeing them as an eager audience and one that needed to be well influenced. In the absence of a definable teenage culture there were obvious settings or situations which would appeal directly to adolescent readers. School stories like Thomas Hughes’s
Teenage fiction 543 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s (1887) were successes at the time of their publication and (particularly Tom Brown’s Schooldays) have remained classics of their genre. R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and The Black Arrow (1889) offered adventure to readers of all ages, but the strength of young male characters such as Jim in Treasure Island and David Balfour in Kidnapped made them popular with contemporary and subsequent generations of teenagers. Stevenson wrote directly for his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd, which may add to his success with the young. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel Huckleberry Finn (1884) are the obvious American counterparts. The two most recent precursors of the teenage novel, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, were published for adults, but both have had a significant influence on adolescent readers. William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) shatters any illusions about childhood innocence. For this reason it appeals powerfully to readers who have begun to recognise this loss in themselves. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1954) has made an even greater impact, because the stream-of-consciousness, first-person narra- tive of Holden Caulfield, with its detached and critical view of the adult world, is not only in itself liberating but has also been imitated in many subsequent novels. In France, the two novels of the first half of the twentieth century that have had most influence on teenagers were similarly published for the adult market. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) is a novel of exceptional poignancy whose message of a first fleeting but passionately felt love is made even more affecting and unfulfilled by Alain- Fournier’s subsequent death in 1914. More than a generation later, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954), the story of a teenage girl’s adjustment to her stepmother (a precursor of what was to become a commonplace theme by the end of the twentieth century), spoke directly to teenagers adjusting their own lives to fit in with the increas- ingly common changing dynamics of their parents’ relationships. The notion of teenagers as a separate group of readers with their own tastes and demanding a style of writing that is directed specifically at them was not adopted by publishers until the second half of the twentieth century. It was then that teenagers began to be identified as a distinct if not definite period of transition between childhood, with its implication of dependency, and the separation and independence of adulthood. But even with the clear identification of the group, whose members in the USA in particular had their own styles of music, clothes and the like, it took a long time to establish an identity for books and, perhaps most importantly of all, to find a suitable space in libraries and bookshops. Naming this invention was a further difficulty. ‘Teenager’, ‘Young Adult’ … what was this audience to be called? And then there was the further problem that everyone knew that readers younger than the magic age of thirteen would be reading these books. Did publishers have a responsi- bility not to include ‘unsuitable’ material for them, or was it enough to have overt labelling warning that this was intended for teenagers? As books for teenagers became increasingly daring in terms of explicit writing about sex in the 1970s, violence in the 1990s and drugs by the end of the century, the naming and marketing of the books was a significant issue. Before the concretisation of teenage fiction into named series, acknowledgement that teenagers wanted books about their own experiences had come gradually and had started (not surprisingly because ‘teenagers’ themselves were first recognised there) in the USA. Post-war teenagers were a far more vociferous and independent group than their predecessors
544 Julia Eccleshare and they were no longer satisfied with the ‘rites of passage’ novels which had previously been considered as suitable teenage fare. These included classic novels such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as well as twentieth-century classics such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960), all of which, in different ways, showed chil- dren moving from innocence to experience through their new understanding of the adult world. Post-war teenagers demanded that their own specific experiences be explored in fiction. ‘Teenage’ became a separate fashionable entity, and so did its fiction. From the mid- 1950s on, and increasingly with the social liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, books for ‘young adults’ were making their mark, attracting serious writers who recognised the poten- tial market of intelligent, sophisticated readers who needed books that would acknowledge their growing awareness of the complex emotions and events they were experiencing. Writers needed to understand the dilemmas that were posed to this generation by their new freedoms and to offer sensible discussion of choices without too much moral instruction. Initially, the prime thrust of books for the new teenage market was romance, the range of books reflecting contemporary mores as well as eternal truths. Fifteen by Beverley Cleary, one of the first novels directed wholly at teenagers, was published in 1956 in the USA but not until 1962 by Penguin in Britain – and then as the second title in their newly launched series for teenagers, Peacocks. It is an unpretentious, straightforward romance, which is unashamedly about a girl’s desire for a boyfriend, the arrival of said boyfriend and their ensuing, developing relationship during the year. Cleary treads a delicate path between the mundane and the romantic, and the book’s very ‘decency’ made it possible for it to fit on to the Peacock list of the time. The reserve and modesty of books such as Fifteen was followed by a wave of books which were considerably more sophisticated and complex. While many still dealt with the very first steps in a relationship, others were tackling the more serious problems like teenage pregnancy, always a possible result of too much teenage romance. K. M. Peyton is a romantic writer to her fingertips but she is also a realist. Her stories about the delin- quent Pennington who has a rare talent for playing the piano started in Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer (1970) with not much more than background romance. But they progressed through The Beethoven Medal (1971), in which Pennington continues on his wayward and brilliant career, to Pennington’s Heir (1974), in which girlfriend, now very young wife, Ruth struggles with a baby and nappies under the shadow of the grand piano, against a background of crashing minor chords. Realistic possibly, but certainly Ruth was a very un-liberated heroine by the standards of the next two decades, while the notion of the two young people actually getting married seems impossibly old-fashioned to a contemporary audience. Teenage fiction emerged almost simultaneously with the first soundings of the women’s liberation movement but it remained unaffected by it for a long time, even though the majority of novels written at the time were by women and directed predomi- nantly at girls. Honor Arundel’s approach of using the popular romance with some elements of reality thrown in was similar to K. M. Peyton’s. The books of both were an important bridge between magazine romance and literary love stories such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Emma, her best-known heroine, first appeared in an uncomplicated adventure Emma’s Island (1968). As an orphan on a remote Scottish island, she has all the qualities necessary for romance and, of course, as she grows up she falls in love. In Emma in Love (1970) Arundel describes the stages of first joy and then disillusionment that Emma goes through until she finally recognises that there will be other boys. But Arundel was well
Teenage fiction 545 aware that love has its price and she was not afraid of confronting the issues of sex and even single parenthood, as in The Longest Weekend (1969) in which Eileen struggles to cope with her three-year-old daughter and her suffocatingly ‘understanding’ parents. Good teenage romances have persisted, looking at every possible angle of love and rela- tionships. But fiction was several years behind the enormous fashion and popular-music upheavals of the mid-1960s. Reading retained its ‘middle-class’ conservative image and was in danger of offering very little to anyone other than the committed reader. The mid-1970s brought a wave of more hard-hitting novels to Britain. Imports from liberated Scandinavia, such as Gunnel Beckman’s Mia (1974) and its sequels, talked openly about sex between teenagers. Bodley Head’s New Adult list on which they appeared was incredibly controversial at the time and did much to shape the identity of subsequent teenage fiction. ‘Nice’ stories lost out to novels which gave a less romantic picture of the realities of contemporary teenage life. Lynne Reid Banks used her romance My Darling Villain (1977) to tackle parental control and particularly parents’ views about class head on. Fifteen-year-old Kate, nice and very middle class, is allowed to give her first adult party, which is gate-crashed by some less-than-middle-class lads. After the ensuing chaos one of them, Mark, stays behind to tidy up, and they start going out together: but Mark’s working-class background is deplored by Kate’s parents. The way in which attitudes about both class and race are discussed by Lynne Reid Banks makes My Darling Villain – the title itself gives it away – a notably dated book, but the theme of loving against parental wishes is perennially popular. Perhaps the most controversial, at the time of publication at least, was Judy Blume’s Forever (1975). The joys and disappointments of first love are shown through the story of Michael and Katherine; more importantly, the joys and disappointments of their first sexual encounter are described explicitly and easily, making Forever readily accessible to pre-teens, too. For such frankness Judy Blume has been heavily censored in the USA, but Forever has an important place in the canon of teenage fiction and Blume’s boldness of purpose and her directness of style were recognised and applauded in many circles at the time. Admitting that sex among teenagers does take place was an important breakthrough for both writers and readers. For the first time, writers were beginning to acknowledge fully the reality of teenage relationships and to recognise the pressures that teenagers are under and the choices they have to make. As with their romantic predecessors, experiences were predominantly retold from the girl’s point of view. Boys’ feelings about sex and rela- tionships were rarely explored except as a shadowy foil to whatever the girl at the centre of the story was thinking. The knowledge that girls are the prime readers of romances and the expectation that therefore the stories should be told from their point of view survives today, and most teenage romances are still told from the girl’s angle. Alan Garner fared better than most in Red Shift (1973). He was absolutely up-to-date in making Tom and Jan’s failure to have a satisfactory sexual relationship the focal point of his story. Because of his parallel and mirroring historical narratives – one set in Celtic Britain and one in the English Civil War – the pertinence of the central story was easily missed and that, combined with Garner’s elusive and cryptic style, meant the book had less impact than it should have. Garner’s male perspective was refreshing, as was his supe- rior writing in an area not always noted for this quality. For both of these reasons Aidan Chambers, too, was an important contributor to the teenage books of the time. A boy’s sensitivities were described by him in Breaktime (1978). Like Garner, Chambers is a demanding writer. His account of Ditto’s sexual initiation and the subsequent reassessment of his life, and especially of his relationship with his father, is
546 Julia Eccleshare retold in a complex but thrilling narrative which offers insight into ways of reading litera- ture as well as speaking openly about sex. Melvin Burgess is not trying to be sensitive in the literary sense in Doing It (2003). Instead he aims to talk about sex as teenagers do them- selves. A group of friends discuss their success – or otherwise – in sexual relationships. The boys are crude in conversation but can be seen to be quite caring as well. They want sex but they also want a relationship. Burgess was praised and criticised in about equal measure for his near-pornographic book. Heterosexual sex between teenagers has long been widely accepted, even if the writing about it has been coy, but gay sex has largely been kept well hidden. In Dance on My Grave (1982) Chambers set out to change this with a book that is far bolder in both subject matter and style than anything that had gone before. Hal has known for some time that he is gay but he has not acknowledged it openly. When Barry appears, the two recognise their need for one another, but also acknowledge that they may not be faithful for ever. The telling of Dance on My Grave is introverted and complex. Jean Ure’s The Other Side of the Fence (1986) is more accessible, but the point of the story – that Richard’s girl- friend Jan turns out to be a Polish boy – is not revealed until the very end, making the story didactic rather than instructive. Both books mark a brief window during which it looked liberated to acknowledge gay sex before a better understanding of the very real risks of AIDS made such fictions harder to tackle. In a new climate which realistically advocated protection rather than abstinence, Chambers returned to it in Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999). A young sexual encounter is set, in present-day Holland, against a background of accepted gay relationships as well as a finely observed historical narrative during which the pressure of time changes the sexual mores, and a concurrent present-day story exploring the arguments on euthanasia. A finely wrought and thoroughly literary novel, Postcards from No Man’s Land won the UK’s prestigious Carnegie Medal. Dutch author Ted van Lieshout’s Brothers (2001) is a deeply moving story about grief and the different ways it can be managed if not contained. After the death of his brother Luke, Maus passes through rage, guilt and isolation as he grieves for the loss of what might have been. But, in finding out more about his brother, Maus discovers that they were joined by the most intimate of secrets – both were gay. Like Chambers’s, van Lieshout’s story is both less discreet and far more subtle than the first generation of gay novels had been. Strangely, though close friendship between girls lies at the heart of so many novels, exploration of gay female relationships has been less often explored. When it has, as in Deborah Hautzig’s Hey, Dollface (1979), it has been less discreet. Hautzig writes far more plainly about Val’s developing feelings for Chloë. Written in the first person by Val, Hey, Dollface describes how the friendship becomes romantic and physical though, after discus- sion, the girls decide not to become lovers. Such openness about relationships marked an important change in the way teenagers and the kind of books they might want to read were perceived. But the upsurge of writing about teenage sex and the conviction that physical attraction was the impetus for all teenage relationships began to distort the realities of society. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else (1976) was an excellent antidote, providing a welcome respite for teenagers who were quite happy having strong but wholly platonic friendships. Owen and Natalie are both intelligent, strongly motivated people set on different paths for further study. Their relationship is stimulating and enriching, each helping the other to discover what it is that they really believe in. Both find it hard to cope with the sexual expectations pushed on them by the media, their peers and even their parents. Paul
Teenage fiction 547 Zindel, too, has recognised that a common purpose may lead to powerful friendships which have nothing to do with sex. In My Darling, My Hamburger (1969) he makes his point about teenage relationships in a story which revolves around two couples who are treating being ‘a couple’ in quite different ways. He harks back to the theme in A Begonia for Miss Applebaum (1989), in which Henry and Zelda tell the story of their befriending of Miss Applebaum in alternate chapters, revealing much of their thoughts about each other and their developing emotions as they find out about the life of their amazing teacher and come to terms with her death. Margaret Mahy has an exceptional understanding of just how emotionally charged teenagers are. She sees this as relating to many things, including the supernatural, as much as necessarily being bound up with preoccupations about sex. In The Catalogue of the Universe (1985) she captures the importance of Tycho and Angela’s friendship. Their need for one another is based on understanding and intellectual harmony rather than anything overtly physical. Once the sexual side of relationships had became a recognised and accepted part of teenage writing, the complexities of such relationships rather than their shock qualities could be discussed in an interesting way. Berlie Doherty’s Dear Nobody (1992) takes a hard look at a girl’s choices when she discovers that she is pregnant. Helen decides to keep the baby and the anguish that causes is resolved only at the end, but her steadfast belief in the rightness of her decision is painfully explored in her diary entries. Chris’s responses are understandably different – he is mostly concerned with not losing Helen – but at least he is credited with a viewpoint and, even if he is clearly not as mature as Helen, he is at least concerned and caring. Dear Nobody has remained the best book on teenage pregnancy despite the recurrence of the theme in titles since. Society’s attitudes to teenage pregnan- cies remain understandably negative given the limitations that they set on the lives of the young women especially. As a result, they give little fictional scope. What has changed is that there is no disapproval or surprise at the fact of sex, only dismay at the careless conse- quences at a time when they could easily be avoided. Changing attitudes to sexual freedom, especially the advent of vociferous feminism, have caused a slowing down in the number of books where women are the underdogs – either emotionally or in terms of getting pregnant. Although the need for love or sex and the importance of relationships is still central to much of teenage fiction, the balance between the sexes has changed radically. During the 1990s what became tagged as ‘girl power’ swept from the worlds of pop music and fashion into fiction, with the result that teenage fiction became even more dominated by writing for girls. Of course, girls are still seeking relationships, but the expectation is that these will be on their own terms. The traditional roles of girls as weak and boys as strong, which lasted an unnaturally long time in fiction (far longer than in society as a whole), are replaced. Girls are now strong in rela- tionships as well as in many other aspects of life. The advent of the teenage diary, begun famously with Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1989), in which Adrian airs his angst about parents, the failures in his life and, above all, his girl- friend Pandora, has been followed up by any number of teenage diaries. The diary format allows anxieties to be aired without preaching and gives an apparent authenticity to the teenage voice. Authenticity is essential to the success of such books and is hard to achieve. Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (2000) strikes exactly the right note. Georgia Nicolson’s intimate thoughts on her family, boys and the family cat much more quickly found a committed audience, and Rennison followed up the first with
548 Julia Eccleshare a string of sequels, all of which catch the heightened emotions of adolescence and extreme self-absorption – one of its key characteristics. While the idea of teenage sex became acceptable, the admittance of the widespread use of drugs by teenagers continued to be kept out of teenage books. Its illegality remains a restriction on how it can be written about but, in the interests of authenticity, the use of drugs by disaffected teenagers is sometimes at least accepted in fiction. Melvin Burgess broke the ground dramatically with Junk (1996), a harrowing story of a group of young people ‘squatting’ in a house in Bristol. Told through the voices of different characters, and especially Tar and Gemma, Junk manages to retain an open-minded and non-judgemental stance on the way of life of the young addicts and their various, largely unsuccessful, attempts to break out of the cycle of drug use. Junk won the CILIP Carnegie Medal but it also caused a storm of protest on publication and for many years afterwards. Surprisingly, few followed where Burgess had so obviously led and drugs have remained notably excluded from teenage novels. Only a handful of younger writers, such as Chris Wooding, who wrote Kerosene (2001), the story of Cal’s tragic passion for lighting fires, when he was only twenty-one, include dope-smoking as one of the time-wasting and mood-changing activities of his young characters. Beyond the limitations of peer relationships in the hot teenage areas of sex and drugs, books for teenagers are an excellent vehicle for exploring all kinds of relationships with other members of the family or other age groups. Recognition of the developing intellec- tual and emotional powers of adolescent readers, as they move out of a relatively safe world in which decisions are made for them, and into one of infinite variety and choice, has encouraged thoughtful and wide-ranging analysis. Closest in terms of subject matter to relationship with their peers are the numerous books which reflect relationships within families and, especially, the breakdown of traditional, close-knit families. To acknowledge parental failing is an extraordinarily difficult thing and many stories have served as valuable conduits for analysing the pain and trauma that can be caused. The extent to which unhappiness and self-examination became a predominant theme reached an all time high in the late 1970s and was in danger of belittling teenage readers in a misguided attempt at social realism. Too many books were devoted to the fragility of traditional family values. Teenage readers were in grave danger of being sold very short by the dearth of high-quality writing and thinking in what was being offered to them. It needed writers of distinction to add an extra dimension to the genre. Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows (1981) painfully traces thirteen-year-old Simon’s traumatic emotional ride as he rejects his stepfather and conjures up spirits from the past whose powers threaten to overwhelm him. Westall borders on the emotionally savage in his version of how a teenager reacts to the replacement of his father by another man. Such emotional force combined with powerful imagery turns subject matter which, in fiction at any rate, was becoming depressingly routine, into a book of enormous power and importance. Anne Fine has tackled family break-ups head on in both Madame Doubtfire (1989) and Goggle-Eyes (1992). Her wit, insight and subtlety set her books apart from the rest and do much to redress the balance and show just how well this hoary chestnut of a theme can be handled. In Madam Doubtfire she carries off the preposterous notion that the estranged father, desperate to spend more time with his children, can come back disguised as a housekeeper who takes charge of the children while the mother is working. The implausi- bility of the deception is deftly handled, with the children acknowledging and distancing themselves from the intrigue in almost equal, and perfectly convincing, measure. In
Teenage fiction 549 Goggle-Eyes, Kitty Killin tells Helly Johnson everything she needs to know about mothers having new and unwanted boyfriends who, as both girls know, may all too easily become unwanted stepfathers. Huddled in the school lost-property cupboard, the two girls share their grief at the loss of the parents they first loved. Helly’s story remains untold as the forceful Kitty unravels her own story about the horrors of Goggle-Eyes and her eventual conversion to him and to his mother’s relationship with him. Paula Danziger’s books are read by many who are not yet into adolescence, but much of what she writes about concerns how teenagers come to terms with parental failure and especially with the breaking up of marriage. Like Anne Fine, Paula Danziger’s ability to write humorously about traumatic feelings and events enables her to inform her readers about important emotional developments without ever preaching to them. In both Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? (New York 1979; London 1986) and The Divorce Express (New York 1982; London 1986) the titles alone indicate Danziger’s lightness of touch on what can all too easily become a portentous and didactic subject area. Cynthia Voight, in Homecoming (New York 1981; London 1983) takes a completely different approach to what became a primary theme in the 1970s and 1980s of family breakdown and abandonment. Warmth rather than humour is threaded through this long and profoundly moving story about four children who are abandoned in a car park by their mother when she can no longer cope with the problems of being a single parent without adequate support. Dicey, the oldest, leads the others on a journey to find their grandmother. Their trek takes them many miles to Maryland and their experiences on the way are a convincing mixture of meetings with people, some good and some bad. Most importantly, the journey is an opportunity for the characters of the children and their interaction with one another to be developed. From the starting point of the break-up of the traditional family, Cynthia Voight has written a story that is full of hope about sibling support and their ability to redefine a family in the absence of parents. Remarkably, too, she is uncondemning in her view of the parents’ behaviour, ascribing it to circumstances rather than apportioning blame. Homecoming is the first in a series of interconnected novels through which Cynthia Voight allows each of the four Tillerman children further room for development. The personal growth of her characters, and particularly of the two boys when they go in search of the father they know they need in Sons from Afar (1989), makes them fasci- nating models for all adolescents, not just those who are needing fictional role models to help them resolve their own problems. Jan Mark’s understanding of teenage confusions is equally acute and, like Voight, she writes about characters developing in all kinds of ways rather than merely as survivors of situations. Mark is particularly sharp in her observations about friendships and their importance to adolescents both at school and at home. Thunder and Lightnings (1976), her first book, revolves around the friendship between the bright newcomer Andrew and Victor, considered locally to be stupid. Their exchanges are spare and reflect both the initial unease and the subsequent comfortableness that the two feel with one another. In Man in Motion (1989) Lloyd, like Andrew, is newly arrived in a new home with a new school and no friends. At first he is at a complete loss to know how to make friends and is puzzled that his sister seems to find the whole thing so easy. But gradually things change and Lloyd finds himself with friends for a whole range of activities and not enough time to devote to his own passion – American football. Lloyd learns how to juggle his loyalties so that he can keep faith with all his friends and have time to do what he really wants.
550 Julia Eccleshare Exploring the complexities of something as comparatively simple as friendships is every bit as important as delving into the more obviously traumatic areas of the problem novels mentioned above. Robert Cormier’s picture of teenage interaction is far bleaker than anything Jan Mark describes. In The Chocolate War (1975) Cormier writes of the merciless persecution of one boy by the powerful secret society in an American Catholic high school in which corruption is rife. Cormier’s novel is almost unremittingly bleak in both style and content. It offers the reader little comfort, though some insights into the cruelties which teenagers can inflict upon one another. Later, in Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), Cormier modifies the bleakness of his message, though the style remains as taut and telling. In it Jerry Renault, victim in The Chocolate War, is semi-recovered from his ordeal and returns to school to face up to his tormentor, revealed as a demonic character who reaches a nasty end. Cormier is never frightened of showing how evil teenagers can be and he expands on this in We All Fall Down (1992). Four teenagers ‘trash’ a house in an act of mindless violence. The damage to the property is bad enough, but worse is that they push fourteen- year-old Karen down the cellar steps leaving her smashed and helpless. The repercussions on all involved – the trashers, Karen and her family, and the mysterious ‘avenger’ who watches it all – are skilfully and carefully unravelled, revealing much about the different characters’ motives and allowing the reader to act as judge of each for themselves. We All Fall Down is a book of tremendous force and the lurid description of the trashing is haunting, but somehow Cormier weaves in a morality which, combined with the sheer quality of his writing, prevents his books from making gratuitous use of violence. In fact, although it was not so much acknowledged when Cormier began writing, violence does surround teenagers and, as well as being instrumental in causing it, they are also often the victims of it. In the changing patterns of society they have some adult attributes – not enough to make them financially or physically independent but enough to make them obviously well beyond the need for the parental protection that younger chil- dren would automatically receive. Teenage lives at the margins of society increasingly began to be explored in fiction, a reflection of the way in which some young people were forced into independence. Keith Grey’s Warehouse (2002) is a compassionate and ulti- mately hopeful story about a group of teenagers who live together in a disused warehouse. There are particular reasons why each is there but all are, in some way, victims of a break- down of traditional support. Fiction about these dispossessed teenagers has led almost seamlessly into the opening up of fiction to include a yet wider cast of characters. These range from teenagers who are in trouble, largely because they have been abused or damaged by an adult earlier in their lives, to those with physical or mental handicaps who have previously been all but invisible in teenage fiction. Tom Bowler’s Midget (1994) gets inside the mind of fifteen-year-old Midget, so called because he is only three feet tall. In addition to being so much too small, Midget has difficulty speaking and suffers from fits. But Midget is a tough boy who is determined to prove himself and to reveal the secret savagery of his older brother. Bowler’s skill is in writing convincingly from within Midget rather than merely describing him. Malachy Doyle achieves something similar in Georgie (2001), the story of a boy whose history of destructive behaviour has brought him into being schooled in a closed institution. Only a caring fellow-pupil can unlock Georgie’s problems and enable the teacher finally to reach him and to begin to turn his life around. Though interesting stories in themselves, in both of these there are moments when it is hard not to feel manipulated by the author. But writing about ‘outsiders’ does not have to
Teenage fiction 551 be like that. Benjamin Lebert wrote Crazy (2001), the story of his own life, when he was just sixteen. Benjamin is paralysed down one side and hopeless at maths. An outcast at all of his previous schools, Benjamin is finally sent to Castle Neuseelen in a last-ditch attempt by his parents to get him properly educated. Benjamin hates the thought of boarding school but at last he finds he is accepted for himself and begins to fit in despite his disabili- ties. Though not autobiographical, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) is equally remarkable in its ability to get inside the outsider teenager. Fifteen-year-old Christopher has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is a brilliant mathematician but has little comprehension of ordinary emotions. When he finds a dead dog in the neigh- bour’s front garden he begins a trail of questions which ends in him discovering why his mother left home. Haddon’s telling of Christopher’s story is both eye-opening and haunting for what it tells us about seeing the world from such a different point of view. Describing how life is for teenagers who are physically disabled is in many ways harder. Traditionally, disabled characters are tamed by learning to live with their disabilities or reformed by overcoming them. Either way is unconvincing in our scientific society and both run the risk of creating characters who descend into self-pity while screaming ‘unfair’. Morris Gleitzman stands such books on their heads by taking a refreshingly humorous look at disability in his ironically titled Blabbermouth (1992) and its sequel Stickybeak (1993). Rowena Batts has something wrong with her vocal chords so, although she’s a brilliant communicator, she cannot actually speak. Despite this, the books are told in the first person and Rowena’s character comes through powerfully. There is no sense of self-pity, almost the reverse, as Rowena uses her inability to speak to her own advantage as often and as outrageously as she can. Lois Keith apparently occupies more traditional terri- tory in In a Different Life (1997) as fifteen-year-old-Libby is forced into a wheelchair after a mysterious illness. Libby is first angry and despairing and finally optimistic as she tries to make the point that she is still an ordinary teenager with all the familiar hang-ups about boys, school, friends and parents. Keith’s skill is in keeping a straight path between honesty and sentimentality. Hannes Keller, the hero of Reinhardt Jung’s Dreaming in Black and White (1996) is born disabled and lives in the knowledge that his father finds his ‘difference’ hard to bear. In his dreams, Hannes slips back from his life in present-day Germany to the Nazi era. Here, it’s clear that he would not be tolerated: like the Jews, he would be readily disposed of. But the present day does not always seem so safe either. Hannes wonders whether the screening of unborn babies will make disability as unaccept- able today as it was for the Nazis. Like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Dreaming in Black and White moves beyond the nearer horizon of teenagers and has the subtlety to change attitudes. The nature of relationships and how they work for teenagers of all kinds is obviously of vital importance during the physical and emotional changes during the teenage years but that does not mean that they are all that teenagers care about. Although often accused of being less politically or socially active than their 1960s counterparts, teenagers at any time are interested in world issues. The incredible response among teenagers to issues concerning the environment and the needs of those in developing countries, as was revealed in the success of first Live Aid and then Band Aid, also needed to be reflected in fiction. Different issues dominate at different times and books which deal with them can be important stories of the moment rather than becoming classics. Robert Swindells’s Brother in the Land (1984) was just one of a number of books published within a five-year span which dealt with what, at the time, seemed a perfectly likely event – the dropping of a nuclear bomb. The prospect of the
552 Julia Eccleshare destruction of the world and speculation as to what might survive, and how, led to some undisciplined and morbid writing. Many seemed to assume that the sheer gravity of the subject matter was enough to make a book on the subject good, although this was clearly not so. Brother in the Land is an exception, and the fact that it is as readable and poignant today proves the point. In the aftermath of the nuclear destruction moral order breaks down, survival depends on selfishness. Or so Danny thinks, until he finds a crumb of reas- surance in the behaviour of a handful of the other survivors. Robert Swindells wrote a book reflecting the mood of the moment but his understanding of how people behave in extremis has made it a book to last. The picture-book format of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1982) might not make it immediately look like a book for teenagers but the comic-strip layout of text and pictures does little to soften the intensity of the tragedy that unfolds through the story. Jim and Hilda, a retired couple, try hard to follow the government’s instructions about what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Briggs’s point was that such guidance was fatuous and would do nothing to help people if a bomb really was dropped. Jim and Hilda are not directly hit by a bomb but they are affected by radiation sickness. Watching them slavishly trying to do as they have been told while all the time turning greener, weaker and balder is almost too painful to bear, but it is a frighteningly powerful way of conveying the impact of the atomic bomb while also serving as a hard-hitting attack on government policy in supporting a nuclear programme. Other books of the same period such as Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust (1985) reflected just how pessimistic current thinking then was. Set after the dropping of the bomb, Children of the Dust describes a horribly mutated race as the sole survivors in a bleak new world. But though the ultimate threat of the twentieth century, nuclear war was not the only one. As world-powers moved towards cooperation rather than confrontation, destruction of other kinds began to be more alarming. The effect of twentieth-century living on the environment became an issue for all by the end of the century. For young people it is of particular significance: one generation has messed up, can the present one put things right? Replacing the post-holocaust novels, the post-global warming or post-genetically modified crops novels are pessimistic about how the world will look. A world covered mostly by water in which people are reduced to poverty and despair is an all too common theme. Marcus Sedgwick’s Floodland (2001) and Julie Bertagna’s Exodus (2002) both describe the survival of a handful of individuals in situations reminiscent of some far-off historical period. Carl Hiassen sees the destruction of what we know coming from another source in Hoot (2002). Roy has recently moved to Hollywood and is horrified by the way the natural environment is being taken over by the big developers. Soon Roy is caught up in the fight for the surviving wildlife in this excellent eco-thriller. In Ann Hallam’s Dr Franklin’s Island (2001), the wildlife is not threatened by buildings but by genetic modifi- cation. Semi, Miranda and Arnie are stranded on a beautiful tropical island after an air crash. But the beauty of the place disguises the horror of the secret lab that they discover. Here all kinds of mutations are taking place as Dr Franklin and his team create pigs with human hands and monkeys with octopus legs. Semi, Miranda and Arnie are transformed themselves and need all their courage and intelligence to survive. Books of this kind pick up on teenagers’ commitment to issues that do not affect them directly but which they know about superficially from newspaper and television reporting. The changing political and social structures of the world are also reflected in fiction. Books for children, including teenagers, have always played a vital role in promoting toler-
Teenage fiction 553 ance and understanding, often and increasingly as an essential antidote to the hysterical and prejudiced outpourings of the press. Contemporary domestic issues have been treated seriously for teenagers as in Ian Strachan’s Throwaways (1992), which describes the pathetic existence eked out by children who have been abandoned by their parents because they can no longer afford to feed them. Sky, Chip and Dig soon learn (as did Danny in Brother in the Land) that integrity can and must survive against all odds if they are themselves to survive as people rather than merely exist. Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold (1993), with its central theme of homelessness and its chilling account of the terrible dangers that the young who live rough may encounter, gives insights into a world which it is all too easy to keep at arm’s length. More radically, taking sides in civil conflicts at home and abroad is a reality for many. In the UK, the political unrest in Northern Ireland offers the closest-to-home look at a divided society. When Joan Lingard wrote the first of what was to become a quintet of books about Protestant Sadie and Catholic Kevin, the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland had only just begun. In The Twelfth Day of July (1970) the two teenagers meet against the background of the annual Orange Day celebration in Belfast. They rapidly become a modern version of ‘star-crossed lovers’ in Across the Barricades (1972), facing increasing hostility from friends and family – with the exception of Kevin’s sister. Realistically, Joan Lingard moves the couple from Belfast in Into Exile (1973) and from then on the political situation in Northern Ireland recedes into the background as the story of the young couple’s early married life unfolds. Sectarian hostilities happen the world over and, even if the Northern Ireland situation is resolved, the Kevin and Sadie books offer shrewd insight into a long episode in the history of the country as well as describe what it might feel like growing up anywhere where there is civil war. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, tension within communities within the UK became increasingly evident as the newly shaping multi-cultural society began to emerge. Given their enthusiasm for contemporary themes, books for teenagers were surprisingly slow to reflect the realities of multi-cultural Britain. Jean MacGibbon’s Hal (1975), the story of the developing friendship of a young girl recently arrived from Jamaica, won the Other Award for its portrayal of a black heroine – amazingly enough it was almost unknown in UK children’s fiction at the time. A small trickle of titles followed, though mostly they were not for teenagers. Jamila Gavin’s trilogy of titles begins with The Wheel of Surya (1992). The trilogy starts in India in 1947, just before Partition, and then traces how Marvinder and Jaspal make their way to England having been separated from their mother after Muslims attack their village. The trilogy continues with The Eye of the Horse (1994) which describes an uneasy way of life for Asian peoples in the immediate post-war period and concludes with The Track of the Wind (1996) which is set back in India with Jaspal caught up in the fight for Independence. Gavin’s trilogy could help teenagers understand something of the culture of the British Asians as well as why they had come to live in Britain. In (Un)arranged Marriage (1999) Bali Rai writes about the problems of Pakistani children who are born in Britain but whose parents still cling to their old traditions. Manny is absolutely determined not to accept the marriage that his parents have arranged for him, but the lengths to which he has to go to avoid it surprise even him. Rai captures the confusion for many families trying to adapt to a new country and its startlingly different morality. How British families see the new multi-cultural society is also a new area for fiction. Frankie finds himself on the opposite side to his mother when she starts a campaign against the newly arrived Romanians in Gaye Hincyilmaz’s Girl in Red (2000). He is
554 Julia Eccleshare immediately attracted to one of the girls and so sees the newcomers as individuals rather than as a collective and intrusive group; his mother sees them only as ‘incomers’ who will take up work and space. In what was very much a book of the moment, Hincyilmaz picked up on the then topical issue of the refugees arriving in the UK from all over Europe. Inspired by the reality of race riots in some of the major British cities, Alan Gibbons boldly confronts the issue of racial tension in whole communities. In Caught in the Crossfire (2003) Gibbons has important political points to make, but he also tells a convincing and dramatic story in which both the Kelly and the Khan families are pulled apart by the simmering racial hatred that is whipped up into a frenzy by the arrival in Oakfield of the leader of the Nazi-styled Patriotic League. Gibbons provokes thought about how easily societies can be pulled apart once prejudice is allowed free rein. For UK writers, describing social and racial tension abroad seems to be easier. In the 1970s and 1980s apartheid, like the threat of a nuclear holocaust, was a live issue for many teenagers and traces of it will remain for many years to come. Toekey Jones’s Skindeep (1985) still deserves reading as it exposes not only the well-documented gulfs within South African society but also the hypocrisy and false thinking on which apartheid oper- ated, since the friendship that develops between the two teenagers is ‘allowed’ because Dave is a ‘pass White’. In Python Dance (1992) Norman Silver explores how Ruth, living as a privileged White in 1960s Johannesburg, begins to question the assumptions of her background. Stepping outside her own world she learns the grim truth of how the Blacks, whom she has been brought up to despise, live. As with apartheid, the extremism of General Pinochet’s regime in Chile exists no longer but James Watson’s Talking in Whispers (1983), a fast-paced adventure story in which Andres witnesses the ultimate in censorship – the burning of books – and plays an important part in exposing the secret service’s shooting of an eminent opponent of the junta, remains as a powerful reminder of an episode in Chile’s history and also as a picture of any repressive regime at any time. The wars that have most recently affected Britain directly have been used as source material by Jan Needle and Robert Westall. Both exploit the particular to describe some- thing much greater: the realities of conflict as set against the propaganda that is generated about them. Jan Needle set A Game of Soldiers (1985) in the Falklands War. Sarah, Thomas and Michael come face to face with a wounded soldier and soon discover the real- ities of the pain, fear and suffering of war, which contrasts sharply with the jingoistic patriotism that was being written about it at the time. Robert Westall did much the same for the Gulf War, though with a quite different kind of story, in Gulf (1992), in which an English boy ‘turns into’ an Iraqi boy soldier. Like readers of all ages, teenagers need a mixture of fictions to sustain their literary interests. Self-knowledge is a spur to growth, but so too is a wider understanding of all aspects of society, present, past and in the future. While the impetus for teenage fiction may have come from the need to provide a vociferous band of readers with amusing stories about themselves, it is now a vehicle for telling the same readers about the world as it really is. Indeed, as novels become increasingly bleak, partly because of the bleakness of social issues such as homelessness, unemployment and the rest, there are serious concerns about what may and may not be suitable fictional fare. Whatever the direct subject matter of teenage fiction, what remains important is the steady flow of good-quality writing for an eager but easily distracted age group.
Teenage fiction 555 Reference Spufford, F. (2002) The Child That Books Built, London: Faber and Faber. Further reading Chambers, A. (1985) Booktalk, London: Bodley Head. Eccleshare, J. (1984/1993) Children’s Books of the Year, London: Andersen Press. Landsberg, M. (1988) The World of Children’s Books, London: Simon and Schuster. Moss, E. (1970/1980) Children’s Books of the Year, London: Hamish Hamilton. —— (1986) Part of the Pattern, London: Bodley Head. Reynolds, K., Brennan, G. and McCarron, K. (2001) Frightening Fictions, London and New York: Continuum. Tucker, N. and Eccleshare, J. (2003) The Rough Guide to Books for Teenagers, London: Rough Guides. Tucker, N. and Gamble, N. (2001) Family Fictions, London and New York: Continuum. Yates, J. (1986) Teenager to Young Adult, London: School Library Association.
43 Crossover literature Rachel Falconer The first years of the new millennium have been miraculous ones for crossover literature, books and films that cross from child to adult audiences or vice versa. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) was snatched up by child and adult readers, taking sales of the series to over 40 million in 200 countries, with translations into forty languages. Her fifth novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, became an Amazon.co bestseller six months before its publication date of June 2003. Shooting for the first Harry Potter film began in October 2000, and its opening night was a glittering event attended by adult stars as well as children. In the milder shades of the book world, the Whitbread Book of the Year rules had been changed in 1999 to include children’s books as contenders for the overall prize. Rowling came close to unseating the Laureates Heaney and Hughes as overall winner. In the event, her third in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the children’s category, while Heaney won the overall prize with his translation of Beowulf. But adult interest in children’s literature has by no means been limited to Harry Potter. Niccolo Ammaniti’s kiddult novel, I’m Not Scared (translated from Italian by Jonathan Hunt) is a bestseller in several countries (see Walden 2003). Walter Moers’s Captain Bluebeard began as a children’s classic in Germany, but is now a European kiddult phenomenon. In Britain, three children’s books were shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award in the millennial year, all of which attracted substantial adult read- erships: Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy (the eventual winner), David Almond’s Heaven Eyes and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Seeing Stone, a re-imagining of the Arthurian legends. Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, the long-awaited final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, was published in 2000. In 2001, The Amber Spyglass won both the chil- dren’s award and the overall Whitbread prize, which for many commentators placed children’s literature on a par with serious, ‘literary’ adult fiction in Britain. A Guardian leader took the point further in suggesting that this was ‘a golden age for children’s fiction’ and ‘at best a bronze age for literary fiction, with the behemoths of yesteryear (Rushdie, Amis, Barnes) stuck in repetitive middle age’ (Guardian Leader 2001). By 2002, the top thirty books on Amazon.co’s general (that is, not children’s) best- seller list regularly included children’s books by Rowling, Pullman, Terry Pratchett and Tolkien. At the same time, most of the top thirty children’s bestsellers sported covers with a crossover, rather than a specifically ‘childish’, appeal. For example, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia were reissued with a dramatic lion’s head staring directly out of the cover, instead of the classic illustrations by Pauline Baynes featuring children in pigtails, shorts and knee socks. The Lord of the Rings was reissued in covers representing scenes and characters from the Peter Jackson film. The Harry Potter books were reissued for adult
Crossover literature 557 readers, in understated silver, black and orange or blue covers – and at a higher price. In W. H. Smith, the major British book retailers, it became commonplace to find, shelved alongside adult popular reading, such contemporary children’s books as Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and sequel, the Lemony Snicket books (for example, A Bad Beginning), Terry Pratchett’s Carnegie award-winning The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents alongside his Discworld novels, and box sets of the first four Harry Potters and Pullman’s His Dark Materials. At the same time, crossover films achieved greater mainstream recognition and attracted larger mixed audiences than ever before. For film, the process had begun some- what earlier, with Spielberg’s E.T. and Indiana Jones, Lasseter’s Toy Story and its sequel, and the crossover adaptation of Anne Fine’s Madame Doubtfire (1987) as Mrs Doubtfire (1993) starring Robin Williams consolidating the mixed-age genre of family entertain- ment. In their at times banal appeal to a common cultural denominator, films like these aimed to amuse, comfort and delight audiences, rather than unsettle them. By contrast, George Lucas’s Star Wars stimulated a crossover appetite for altogether more ambitious material. Epic in scale and mythic resonance, Star Wars was and is a nation-fashioning narrative in which both child and adult audiences have become deeply involved. But even with such established precedents, 2000+ were still landmark years for crossover film. In 2000, Minkoff’s screen version of E. B. White’s Stuart Little (1999) earned an Oscar nomination for best visual effects and an ASCAP Award for top box office film. The sequel, Stuart Little 2 (2002), starring the voices of A-list actors such as Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie and Michael J. Fox, proved just as popular. The brilliant animated features, Adamson and Jenson’s Shrek and Docter and Silverman’s Monsters, Inc., were both released in 2001. The following year, both films earned several Oscar nominations and other awards, Shrek proving particularly successful. After a nomination for a Golden Palm award at Cannes, Shrek won a Bafta for Best Adapted Screenplay and an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The year 2001 also saw the release of Chris Columbus’s adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, both of which attracted record numbers of mixed-age audiences. Of the two, it was Jackson’s, with its magnificent New Zealand landscapes and an epic narrative to rival Star Wars, that swept up the major awards (Baftas for best film and direction; Oscars for best cinematography, and more). In 2001, Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien achieved for film what The Amber Spyglass achieved for fiction: it established the crossover text as ‘serious’ art, worthy of critical recognition as well as popular acclaim. This situation seems set to last the next decade at very least, with a sequel to Shrek, and further episodes of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings already on general release or in production, and plans underway for a film version of the Pullman trilogy. For reasons discussed at the end of this essay, I would consider ‘crossover literature’ as something distinct from writing ‘for all ages’. But even setting this point aside, ‘crossover’ is still rather a slippery term that can be used to signify very different things. In postcolo- nial studies, for example, crossover is the critical term for texts that cross cultures or (like Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet) represent such cultural shifts in the narrative. In gender studies, crossover is used to signify shifts in gender perspective (as in Carter’s The Passion of New Eve). In children’s literature criticism, however, crossover is generally meant to refer to a crossing between age boundaries, the boundaries (for example, young child, nine to fourteen, young adult, adult) themselves being subject to constant redefini- tion. Even in this field, ‘crossover’ can refer to different aspects of the narrative communication act: the relation between authors and texts, the internal attributes of texts,
558 Rachel Falconer or the relation between texts and readers, for example. Surprisingly, more has been written about cross-writing and dual address (with a focus on authors and narrators) than about texts or crossover reading. Barbara Wall’s The Narrator’s Voice focuses on narratorial dual address in children’s fiction (Wall 1991); Shavit argues that children’s literature partici- pates in two systems (child and adult) simultaneously (Shavit 1986: 63–92; for an opposing view see Grenz 1988). Children’s Literature 25 is devoted to ‘Cross-Writing’, although it includes one article specifically on reader reception (Kooistra’s ‘Goblin Market as a Cross-Audienced Poem’). Sandra Beckett’s Transcending Boundaries (Beckett 1999) is subtitled ‘Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults’, and seven of its four- teen essays are concerned with cross-writing, in the Netherlands, France, the former Soviet Union and Italy. The other seven address a wide variety of issues, however, including crossover implied and actual readers, double attribution of texts, and post-post- modern configurations of childhood. With this range of perspectives, Beckett’s is arguably the best single-volume introduction to crossover literature yet available. Cross-writing includes authors who write sometimes for children and sometimes for adults, as well as writers (or intra-textually, narrators) who address more than one age of reader/viewer in the same text. Contemporary examples of the former include: Joan Aiken (Mansfield Revisited (1984), a Jane Austen novel for adults, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), a Gothic thriller for children); Nina Bawden (Circles of Deceit (1998) for adults, Carrie’s War (1973) and The Peppermint Pig (1975) for children); Neil Gaiman (graphic novels and a recent work of fantasy, Neverwhere (2000) about a fantastical underworld below London, for adults; and Coraline (2002) for children); Ted Hughes (his works for children include How the Whale Became (1963) and The Iron Man (1968) and The Iron Woman (1993)); Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children (1981) for adults and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) for children); Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits (1985) for adults, and The City of Beasts (2002) for children). Of the above, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Carrie’s War and Coraline have crossed over into adult readerships, although they are not obviously dual-addressed. Lena Kareland compares two cross-writing authors, the American Carl Sandburg and the Swede Lennart Hellsing (Kareland 1999). Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is mostly read by adults, while her fantasy novels attract dual-age readerships. Now that a trend has been established for adults reading children’s literature, the number of books that cross age groups is certain to increase, whether or not there is any shift in narrative strategy or authorial intention. Publishers have recently been directly involved in promoting this kind of crossover writing, for the obvious reason that a fan-base has already been established in one reading age group and may the more easily cross over into another. The publisher Hyperion has recently supported crossover titles from Alice Hoffman, Rudolfo Anaya and Michael Dorris. Rarer are writers like Michel Tournier, who rewrites the same texts for different age groups. (see Beckett 1999a). Dual-address fiction, the subject of Wall’s study, is some- times difficult to distinguish from children’s texts that have acquired the status of ‘classic’ literature and passed into adult reading. All three early editions of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were designed to be read by children, though of different ages. But it has since become an adult classic, while many modern children now find the unabridged Alice quite a difficult text with which to engage. (For the use of the child focaliser in Alice, see Cameron 1999.) Market trends, rather than dual addressivity, presumably underlie the success of recent children’s publications by such celebrity figures as Sophie Dahl (The Man with Dancing Eyes (2003)).
Crossover literature 559 Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children contains large sections about children, though not addressed to them nor, historically, read in large numbers by them. Adult fiction and biography about childhood experiences are currently on the rise, and while they do not attract child readers, they often portray a crossover of temporal perspectives that closely relate to the dynamics of dual-addressed or dual-audienced fiction. Thus any holistic analysis of crossover literature should include consideration of recent publications for adults about childhood such as Michael Frayn’s Spies, Martin Amis’s Experience, Nick Hornby’s About a Boy and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. There are many precedents for this kind of dual-perspectived (as opposed to dual-address) fiction, from Dickens’s Great Expectations and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The examples cited so far are works by crossover writers, or works with dual focalisa- tion or address. But there has been comparatively little analysis of the experience of cross-reading which is, in many ways, the better indicator of a significant shift in cultural attitudes and, arguably, the more interesting for specialists in narrative theory. (For an excellent exception, see van Lierop-Debrawer 1999.) If we think of narrative not only as something constructed by an author, mediated by a narrator, but also as a script or a score that is activated by a reader’s participation, it becomes evident how potent the crossover phenomenon is, how intimately connected it is with the workings of narrative temporality, and time as narrative. Narrative has been characterised as a reflexive process, which discovers or creates repetitive and closural patterns; equally, it is future-oriented, with an instinct for amplification, differentiation and deferral. (On narrative difference and deferral, see for example, Derrida 1978; Ricoeur 1984; Lacan 1984.) In crossover literature, the subject of narrative (whether character, text or reader) gets split into two temporal states, ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, in a way that renders it acutely susceptible to narrative’s opposing dynamics of closure and deferral. (On plot as a narrative dynamic of Freud’s pleasure and death drives, see Brooks 1984.) Bakhtin defines the chronotope as the narrative organisation of time and space in any text (‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope’, Bakhtin 1984: 84–258); to adopt his term, the readers of crossover books and films are bi-chronotopically oriented. They occupy two positions in the narrative simultaneously, and are thus doubly subjected to narra- tive’s twin temporal drives. Without the gloss of literary theory, many adults have registered such a response to reading Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl or any other crossover novels which cannot easily ‘pass’ for an adult work. They are easily engrossed by the story itself, but they are also recollecting former reading selves, who are in turn reading themselves into future identi- ties. On the face of it, crossover reading can be explained in very straightforward terms: adults are rediscovering the addictive pleasure of a good story, told directly and without any (post)modernist angst about the problems of representation. But considered a little more deeply, ‘rediscovery’, ‘addictive pleasure’ and ‘a good story’ take us to the most complex aspects of narrative, psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory. Francis Spufford gives a powerful account of the connection between his own earlier and later reading selves in The Child That Books Built (2002). But there has been surprisingly little discus- sion of such reading experiences in specialist children’s literary criticism. U. C. Knoepflmacher explores ideas similar to Spufford’s though more briefly, in ‘The Critic as Former Child: A Personal Narrative’ (Knoepflmacher 2002). (On the influence of chil- dren’s books on Virginia Woolf and other modernists, see Dusinberre 1987.) Another area that has been productively explored is the childhood reading of writers for adults.
560 Rachel Falconer But a good starting point for further study would be to adopt a dialogic approach to crossover literature, an approach which would resist universalising statements about the range of texts this appellation signifies (we are not just talking about the Harry Potter books), and would recognise in such narratives the vertiginous play between younger and older, between former, present and future selves, both intra- and extra-textually. The editors of Children’s Literature 25 lay the ground for such an approach, stating in their introduction, ‘we believe that a dialogic mix of older and younger voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal’ (Myers and Knoepflmacher 1997: vii; and see IRSCL 1987). But their understanding of dialogism curiously emphasises consensus over difference. Do Huckleberry Finn and Robinson Crusoe ‘dissolve the binaries and contraries that our culture has rigidified and fixed’ (Myers and Knoepflmacher 1997: viii)? To me, these are crossover narratives that demonstrate the very ‘hostile internal crossfire’ Myers and Knoepflmacher seem keen to transcend (vii); and this internal polemic is what makes Huck and Crusoe dialogic texts. Three Bakhtinian concepts are of particular relevance to this field. The idea that iden- tity is dialogically constructed, always the product of a confluence of voices, is essential for any theoretical account of crossover literature. The concept of heteroglossia, representing the other’s speech, offers flexible, nuanced ways of accounting for the relation between child and adult discourses. And chronotopicity, the materialisation of space and time in narrative, helps us to consider the ways in which texts shift audiences over time, the way the categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ are constructed differently over time, and the way readers are created out of a composite of different temporal perspectives. But since it is ‘the chronotope that defines genres and generic distinctions’ (Bakhtin 1984: 85), an appro- priate starting point might be to identify the specific genres that are currently crossing over from adult to child, or more dramatically, child to adult audiences. In the survey that follows, my choice of crossover titles is primarily guided by actual audience response. But since this account focuses on contemporary examples which may or may not have had time to acquire a mixed audience base, I am also guided by publishers’ marketing strate- gies, advance reviews and other indicators of intended audience. (An intended actual audience is not the same as an author’s ideal or implied audience, in Wayne Booth’s sense in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth 1961). The latter can be inferred from within the text itself, the former requires a dialogic consideration of text in relation to actual, historical reader or viewer. Obviously, though, all these categories of reader are interlinked.) The major areas of ‘crossover’ in contemporary literature and film are in the genres of magic fantasy, epic fantasy, science fiction, gothic, history and historical legend. There is also considerable crossover appeal in contemporary picture books, comics and graphic novels, and (though in a different way) social realism. Most of the crossover genres make use of ancient myth, traditional fairy tale or legend, while science fiction and fantasy reproduce the scale and thematic foci of northern and/or classical epic narratives. Many crossover books belong to more than one genre (for example, Harry Potter is both school story and magic fantasy); indeed, it is rare to find a work of fiction with only one chrono- tope, one generic world-view. And many genres, particular historical legend, science fiction, magic and epic fantasy, already have a long history of crossover between child and adult audiences. All these genres are offshoots of the adventure narrative, an ‘ur-genre’ that forms the basis of much adult as well as children’s fiction. The chronotope of adventure- time is a common feature of many adult classics that have crossed over into children’s literature, sometimes adapted and abridged, sometimes entire. (On the chronotope of adventure-time in ancient Greek romance, see Bakhtin 1984: 86–110.) Pre-twentieth-
Crossover literature 561 century examples include abridged translations of the Odyssey (rather than the Iliad) and Don Quixote, and abridged versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Unabridged versions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop were read to, or by, children in their original versions, and some adventure novels appealed strictly to one gender, but crossed age boundaries seam- lessly: for example, Henty’s novels appealed to boys and men, and Charlotte Yonge’s to girls and women. Genres that have crossed over in the past, but are not ‘cross-breeding’ on a large scale at present, include religious allegory and spiritual writing; dystopias; family and school stories; and nonsense verse and prose. In the genre of religious allegory, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the first English crossover books, being very quickly modified and adapted for children after its original publication in 1678. Its adaptation took place at a time when much literature published specifically for children was didactic or religious in content (see Jackson 1989). Twentieth-century crossovers in the same genre, although crossing in the other direction, include Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Dystopias were another form of early crossover which are rarer on the contemporary scene (Peter Dickinson has written dystopic children’s literature that sometimes crosses to adult readerships). Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1745) was very soon adapted for children, though in its edited version it reads as a more straightforward adventure story (the first, Lilliputian volume was often published on its own for children) (Cunliffe 2000). Twentieth-century dystopias for adults which have become children’s classics include: Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. In the case of Lord of the Flies and other dark, satirical works, such unlikely crossover might partly be explained by the focalisation of the narrative through a child character. Family and school stories that have crossed from child to adult audiences in the past (and still do so) include Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Alcott’s Little Women, which domesticates Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. Works of this genre were often overtly didactic and/or nostalgic about family life. Often consciously anti-domestic (though not, for all that, necessarily less conservative) were the Victorian ‘nonsense’ writers, Edward Lear (Nonsense Songs), Hilaire Belloc (Cautionary Tales for Children) and Lewis Carroll. Something of their legacy survives in Ogden Nash, Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, in Spike Milligan’s The Goon Show (1950s–60s), in the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and The Life of Brian (1979), and in the work of crossover comedians Billy Connolly and Robin Williams. By the mid-1970s, such chronotopic spaces as the home, playground or classroom were more often the ground for gritty, even brutalising, social realism. In the twenty- first century, school stories are more likely to cross age groups, if generically they are crossed with something else. The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer situates gothic plots and characters in a conventional American high school. The films American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001) cross high school narratives with, respectively, magic realism and gothic thriller. As evidenced by the current, odd popularity of ‘School Disco’ parties among adults, school narratives acquire a crossover appeal when they are divorced from real life, when they are made to signify the possibility of an outlandish transformation. Some genres that have traditionally crossed over in the past are mutating into different genres but retaining their crossover appeal. For example, animal fables are developing into natural science and environment narratives, which less overtly anthropomorphise their
562 Rachel Falconer animal protagonists. Classic crossover animal fables include Kipling’s Just So Stories and Jungle Books, Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Like the earlier Tarka the Otter (1928) by Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1960) has moved well away from animal fable to nature study. Another mutation of the animal fable is into epic fantasy. Adams’s Watership Down (1972) was an early, outstanding success in this genre, and currently Brian Jacques’s Redwall series about rabbits, rats, ferrets and other animals, and Steven Oppell’s Silverwing trilogy about bats, are beginning to attract adult readers as well as children. Animal fables can also obviously be employed for political alle- gory. According to Larissa Klein Tumanov, Aesopian children’s literature in the former Soviet Union became a vehicle to convey dissident views to both child and adult reader- ships (Tumanov 1999). The animal fable also survives in works such as Allende’s The City of Beasts (for children) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Martel crosses Latin American animal fable with natural science (the tiger named Richard Parker is always represented as a dangerous wild animal, never (beyond his name) personified) and Crusoesque survival narrative. The result is a ‘boy’s novel for adults’, according to its dust-jacket, successful enough to win the 2002 Booker Prize. But unquestionably the genre that is crossing age groups most frequently in western countries today is fantasy; and the most visible direction of crossover is from child to adult audiences. Within this genre, there is an important distinction to be made between the sub-genres of what I would call magic and epic fantasy (but the choice of labels is unimportant). Furthermore, these two should be distinguished from ‘magic realism’ or ‘the fantastic’. It seems absurd to compare Rowling’s Harry Potter series (magic fantasies) and Pullman’s His Dark Materials (epic fantasy); such a comparison usually ends by judging Harry Potter to be conventional, derivative and superficial. But this is the result of reading all fantasy, and indeed all child-to-adult crossovers, as texts of the same kind. Bakhtin defined epic as a genre formally oriented towards the past, which is arguably a more reliable means of distinguishing it from other genres than length or extent of detailed realisation of a fictional world. In Pullman’s case, the attitude is one of irreverence, but the trilogy is still oriented towards the past in its extensive polemic against traditional interpretations of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Rowling’s novels may be long (the fifth Harry Potter book is over eight hundred pages), but they are not concerned with questions of species origin; they do not cross swords with Genesis, or Icelandic saga, or classical or eastern myth. The Harry Potter books have been criticised as lightweight, but they are not built to convey epic gravitas. The same was said in an earlier generation of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (again magic fantasy), when contrasted with Tolkien’s epic trilogy. Despite the presence of Dementors and death scenes, the Potter books are light reading in a certain sense. In my view, their lightness is their strength (the same might be argued for many novels in this genre). In Six Memos for the Next Generation, Italo Calvino, himself an outstanding crossover writer, describes what he thinks literature will still be uniquely capable of providing us, in a technologically accelerated world (Calvino 1996: 3–30; and see Poeti 1999). The first thing literature will still be able to give us is lightness, which for Calvino has to do with an orientation towards the real world that is not escapist, but that refuses to be ruled by immediate context. It suggests a mobility of perspective that resists the ‘slow petrification’ which Calvino saw occurring across the globe (Calvino 1996: 4). At the end of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan de-ossifies the animals turned to stone by the White Witch. And in
Crossover literature 563 The Silver Chair, when Eustace falls off a cliff, Aslan reverses the gravitational fall and blows him safely into Narnia. Both episodes convey Calvino’s sense of lightness; chronotopically they define the Chronicles of Narnia as magic rather than epic fantasy. The highly popular German writer Cornelia Funke has written a magic fantasy that places age-crossover at the centre of the narrative. Published in English as The Thief Lord, it involves a magical carousel that can turn children into adults, and vice versa. Among the most successful is Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, which pits an unscrupulous venture capi- talist (equipped like James Bond with technological gadgetry, but conspicuously lacking Bond’s civil servant sense of duty) against a feminist detective elf. The capitalist and the elf are children (over 100 years old, Holly is still young for an elf) but this book and its sequel Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident frequently appear in adult sections of major bookshops. Michael Chabon’s Summerland (2002) is another recent magic fantasy selling extremely well to children and adults. Magic fantasy is also not magic realism, although both are governed by a threshold chronotope, in which characters instantaneously cross over into different realities or states of being. The back of a wardrobe and King’s Cross Station Platform 9¾ are chronotopic images of the magic threshold. A. N. Wilson defines C. S. Lewis’s type of fantasy as ‘the interpenetration of worlds … quite different’ to Tolkien’s (Wilson 1991: 226). Todorov described the ‘fantastic’ in terms that have become canonical for any definition of magic realist fiction. Such a text ‘oblige(s) the reader to … hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described’ (Todorov 1993: 33; and see Armitt 1996). In Todorov’s view, most texts resolve into one of these two modes of explanation. If events are explained rationally, the fantastic resolves into the uncanny; if explained supernaturally, the fantastic resolves into the marvellous. Adult magic realism makes frequent use of the child’s perspective. The use of the child focaliser in Bruno Shultz’s short stories, for example, heightens the reader’s sense of disorientation as the narrative shifts from natural to supernatural worlds. One can agree or disagree with Todorov’s view of textual closure, but essentially the fantastic ‘occupies the duration of … uncertainty’ and consists of ‘that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’ (Todorov 1993: 25). But if magic realism hesitates on the threshold between two realities, magic fantasy crosses the threshold and continues ‘further up and further in’. In Todorov’s terms, magic fantasy opts for the supernatural explanation; it crosses over from the fantastic into the marvellous. There are magic realist works for children, characterised by this hesitation between real- ities, but they cross over to adult audiences less frequently than magic fantasy at present. An early example is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s first collection of fairy tales for children, The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King (1816), which, according to Dagmar Grenz, resembles his fairy tales for adult readers in its doubling of realistic and fantastic worlds (Grenz 1988). And while his second collection, The Strange Child (1817), simplifies plot development and characterisation for child readers, it is the former work that has since proved more popular with child and adult readers. According to Teya Rosenberg, magic realist works for children share many of the same characteristics as those for adults, including: the combination of naturalistic and supernatural effects, use of folklore, political content or subtext, and repetitions in plot and imagery (Rosenberg 2001: 14). Furthermore, Grenz argues that magic realism produces an opposite kind of hesitation in child readers to that described by Todorov:
564 Rachel Falconer while the adult reader sees himself questioned, by the ingress of the fantastic, in his thinking about rationality, the child reader feels his belief in the fantastic put in ques- tion … by the parental advocates of the reality principles on whose care and recognition he is existentially dependent. (Grenz 1988: 93) Twentieth-century examples of magic realist works for children include Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), Alan Garner’s Elidor (1965) and Louis Sacher’s Holes (1998). More recently, in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002), the eponymous heroine discovers a parallel, counterfeit world in the corridors of her own house. The eeriness of the story derives from the deceptive similarities between the two worlds and the difficulty of keeping them apart. This is a magic realist novel that is clearly being marketed for a crossover audience, the dust-jacket bearing Bloomsbury’s prediction that the novel ‘will appeal to adults and children alike’ and a quotation from Norman Mailer describing it as ‘a comic strip for intellectuals’. But the crossover genre that has garnered the most critical (in addition to popular) acclaim in recent years is epic fantasy. It is in contemporary children’s, rather than adult, fiction that readers are most likely to find the revival of the mythic narrative, heroic quests to discover and test the self, battles between the archetypal forces of good and evil, stories that aspire to shape national histories as destiny. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) largely set the parameters of the genre. Initially intended as a sequel to The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings gestated into an entirely different kind of narrative, one which publishers were uncertain whether to class as child or adult fiction (see White 2001: 172–5). Richard Adams’s Watership Down was also enormously influential in defining the ambitious scope of this genre, as well as its crossover appeal. S. F. Said calls Watership Down ‘one of the original popular culture crossovers: a book that hooked adults and chil- dren on such a vast scale that it made publishing history’ (Said 2002). This is a Virgilian epic transposed to an English landscape, with the rabbit Hazel as the pius Aeneas who leads his people to a new and better country. Hazel and the other rabbits are distinguished by their Trojan capacity for suffering and survival against the odds, an epic theme that captured child and adult imaginations in the 1970s. At around the same time, Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy (1968, 1971, 1972) explored epic questions common to classical epic narrative and the Book of Genesis, such as how or whether human beings can be reconciled to loss and death. Contemporary epic fantasies such as Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials (1995, 1997, 2000) and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series have had little difficulty in crossing between child and adult readerships. Also attracting substantial adult audiences are Susan Cooper’s Seaward, Raymond Feist’s Riftwar saga, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer, Susan Price’s The Sterkarm Handshake, the Australian Garth Nix’s Sabrie and the Canadian Steven Oppell’s Silverwing trilogy. One way that epic expresses its orientation to the past is in the retelling of foundational myths to strengthen a community or nation’s sense of present identity. We see such retellings in the tales of El-ahrairah in Watership Down, and in the ballads sung in Elrond’s house in Tolkien’s Rivendell. The embedded narratives of Brian Patten’s The Story Giant are networks of myths that sustain fragmented and endangered communities. Like Scheherezade, characters in these works survive through telling and listening to stories. The epic hero’s individual quest for self-knowledge is thus metaphorically linked to the quest of an entire community for recognition and stability. In Oppell’s Silverwing trilogy,
Crossover literature 565 the hero – appropriately named Shade – survives only in the memories and stories told of his exploits. These become part of the bat colony’s collective memory, lodged in the echo chambers that house the colony’s myths of origin. In film, George Lucas’s Star Wars begins in medias res, the first three episodes recounting the middle of the saga, the next three looping back, and the projected final three recounting the end of the war; nine rings, then, will complete this Wagnerian cycle of films. Given the strong precedence for crossover epic film which Star Wars established, Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring hardly needed the massive support of Tolkien enthusiasts to ensure its success with a dual-aged audience. Dreamworks, the company producing the trilogy of Lord of the Rings films, plans to follow with an adaptation of Pullman’s His Dark Materials, also in trilogy. Crossover epic fantasy, then, seems set to fill bookshelves, and cinema screens, for years to come. The story goes that Tolkien and Lewis once agreed to write a complementary pair of fantasy novels; Tolkien was to take time, and Lewis space (Wilson 1991: 154). Tolkien dawdled over The Lost Road, while Lewis speedily produced the science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), eventually the first of a trilogy. The continuities between epic fantasy and science fiction are too many to be disentangled here (Star Wars is certainly both). But in the chronotope of science fiction, space (outer or inner) is generally domi- nant over time, and its temporal orientation is generally towards the future rather than the past. From Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds to present-day bestsellers, science fiction has successfully drawn a mixed- age audience. Some of Philip K. Dick’s novels, such as The Man in the High Castle (1965), develop alternative futures out of hypothetically altered historical events; these, along with his collected short stories, have crossed audience ages on a mass scale. His science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the beautifully made crossover film Blade Runner. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is ostensibly an adult book, while Farmer in the Sky (1950), Starman Jones (1953) and Starship Troopers (1959, also later adapted as a film) are young adult books. But readers of science fiction enjoy the conventions of the genre, whatever its level of address. Dick and Heinlein enthusiasts have generally read the whole of the author’s output, not just the books intended for their age category. The same could also be argued for novels by Ben Bova, Alan Nourse, Robert Sheckley and Dean Koontz. Roger Zelazny’s The Amber Chronicle, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist Clingfire trilogy and Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space are a just few of the crossover titles selling particularly well currently. If there are crossover space fictions, there are also crossover fictions about different historical times. Closely allied to fantasy are fictions drawing on historical legend. What T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone did for mixed audiences of the 1940s, writers like Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Seeing Stone) and Catherine Fisher (Corbenic) are doing for crossover readerships in the new millennium. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967), Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers (1959) and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising trilogy (completed 1977) were published for children but by now attract crossover audi- ences. Peter Dickinson’s ‘young adult’ novels (Tulku, The Iron Lion, Eva …) are read by many adult readers. His recent publication, The Kin (2001), which concerns children of a biblical era inhabiting a prelapsarian ‘Rift Valley’, is described by one adult Amazon.co reviewer as ‘too good to be “relegated” to the Children’s Section’ (13 August 2001). Gillian Rubinstein (alias Lian Hearn)’s Across the Nightingale Floor (2002) is a quest narrative that combines legend and fantasy, and concerns a boy with magical powers brought up among ‘the Hidden’ in rural Japan, who seeks to discover his destiny within a
566 Rachel Falconer walled city. The novel’s dust-jacket describes it as ‘a stunningly powerful story, a rare work of fiction that appeals equally to young readers and adults’, while its web-site (www.nightingalefloor.com) lists twenty countries of publication and hubristically announces the novel as ‘set to be a world wide phenomenon’. From Scott’s Rob Roy and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo to Leon Garfield’s Jack Holborn (1964), historical fiction and romance have attracted a mixed-aged readership for centuries (see Fisher 1986). But arguably we have reached a period in which the demand for historical adventure stories in the children’s market has come to overlap significantly with a reviving interest in popular history among adult audiences. Simon Schama’s recent BBC publication and TV series, A History of Britain, and the children’s history series by Fiona MacDonald and Terry Deary (The Vile Victorians, et al.) may not have much content in common, but they all place an emphasis on high adventure, flamboyant protag- onists and a clear, vivid and direct narrative style. Sensationalism can distort the history, whether aimed at adults or children, as in the case of Farman’s The Very Bloody History of London (1999). This gruesome narrative, marketed as ‘a crossover book for teenagers into adulthood’, raised critical eyebrows because of its explicit descriptions of torture, espe- cially of women. By contrast, the novelist Michael Morpurgo engages seriously with history in gripping narratives that have crossed from child to adult audiences. Continuing in the tradition of Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword (1956), Morpurgo has written novels relating to, for example, the eighteenth-century Scottish clearances (The Last Wolf), the foot-and-mouth crisis (Out of the Ashes), and the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki (Kensuke’s Kingdom). Concerns about the appropriateness of ‘adult material’ in children’s books is also recur- rently voiced in discussions of children’s social realist fiction (see, for example, Brennan 1996; Baer 2000; Koehnecke 2000). By ‘social realism’, I mean broadly speaking any fiction that represents the actual, material world and focuses on social relations rather than individual, heroic quests or journeys (for example, the desire to be identified through a social group or conversely the need to express a distinct selfhood within a community). ‘Crossover’ in this context can mean either texts that cross from child to adult audiences and vice versa, or texts that are aimed at teenagers crossing over into adulthood (‘young adult’ literature) (see Irving 1996). In practice, though, there is substantial overlap between these two types of crossover. An early example of adult to young adult crossover is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974), a bleak novel about school corruption, was also written as an adult novel but marketed very successfully for young adults. More recently, Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1992) and Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) were marketed as adult novels, but soon attracted large numbers of teenage readers. The controversies raised by crossover in this genre are slightly different to the ones discussed so far. What worries parents, teachers and journalists is the extent to which contemporary literature for children or teenagers deals explicitly with ‘adult’ themes: racism, class warfare, mental illness, drug abuse, sexual practices, violence and crime. The crossover is in the material, which then stimulates (it is feared, damaging) changes in perspective in the reader. In effect, this is a reaction against the ‘tweenager’ phenomenon (children developing ‘too quickly’ into adults), which is a direct counterpart to ‘kiddul- tery’ (adults masquerading as children). One of the first such ‘tweenager’ novels was Judy Bloom’s Forever (1975), which dealt with teenage sex with a directness heretofore not attempted for this age group. The prolific author Jacqueline Wilson, described as ‘the voice of the “tweenage” generation’
Crossover literature 567 (O’Brien 2002), writes ever more explicitly about divorce, abandonment and mental disorders. Wilson’s novel Secrets (2002) concerns the friendship of two girls, one with a violent stepfather, the other with a mother who forces her on to fad diets. Secrets quickly made it to the bestseller lists of children’s literature but, as one reviewer notes, is the sort of book that ‘children like, but that makes adults uncomfortable’ (O’Brien 2002). Julie Myerson similarly finds Anne Fine’s Up on Cloud Nine (2002) a disturbing read. She describes the novel, which concerns a child with suicidal tendencies, as ‘a strange, dark, slippery beast of a book’, but she is also sure her own children will love it (Myerson 2002). The treatment of teenage sex in Melvin Burgess’s Lady, My Life as a Bitch (2001), Doing It (2003) and Filth (2003) have provoked hostile reactions from adult reviewers (see Burgess 2001). While such novels may not attract adult audiences in the way chil- dren’s fantasy currently does, they are in some respects more ground-breaking in the way they dramatise cultural and chronological crossover at the level of style and theme. An example of stylistic crossover is Chloë Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime, which received mixed reviews because of its disturbing treatment of sexuality and murder. The central character is a teacher who thinks like a pathologically disturbed child, and her narration problematises Wall’s conception of dual-address fiction. Focalised through this schizophrenic character, the narration ‘veers from childlike to adolescent, to would-be mature dirty-realist’, according to one reviewer (Joughin 2002). An example of the thematic treatment of crossover is Paul Magrs’s Strange Boy (2002), which relates the experiences of a boy on a council estate who discovers he is gay. Magrs, however, testily rejects such simplifying synopses, as well as the criticism that he has written an adult book for children; ‘all of my books have been crossover: between fiction and theory, straight and gay, fantasy and realism’ (Magrs 2002). Strange Boy is ‘for people of thirteen and older’, but it explores threshold crossings of several kinds, including class, gender and chronology. Realistic representation of the threshold crossing is perhaps the distinguishing feature of the chronotope of young adult literature. In a 2001 conference at the Roehampton Institute in London, the Dutch crossover author Anne Provoost remarked that she made teenagers the subject of her novel Falling (now adapted as a film), because they were at a stage in their lives when it was still ‘possible to swerve’, an idea that is as likely to appeal to middle-aged adults as young ones. It is worth pointing out, though, that not all crossover social realism is dark, disturbing and violent. Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat stories (1990–) give an off-beat view of life in Los Angeles with a sardonic humour that has attracted child and adult readers (Russell 2002). While this article has concentrated on text-based crossover fiction, one could argue that the visual media first created, and still sustain, the largest crossover audiences (on the history of children’s film, see Wojcik-Andrews 2002). In the 1930s in the USA, Bugs Bunny cartoons were screened between newsreels and feature films and watched by adult audiences. Major American newspapers all had (and mostly still have) comic pages, which mixed together child and adult strips (the latter being soap operas, or detective strips like Dick Tracy). If strips like Schultz’s Charlie Brown could be said to appeal to the adult in the child, Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (in which a stuffed tiger comes alive only when there is no adult figure in the frame) appeals to the child in the adult; both, in any case, have become crossover classics. Gothic thrillers and monster movies drew mixed audiences from a very early date. King Kong was apparently one of the few films that C. S. Lewis liked (Wilson 1991: 160). The film (rather than the original book) of The Wizard of Oz still has cult followings among adults and children, and was a seminal influence on Salman Rushdie (Rushdie 1992). As in text-based
568 Rachel Falconer fiction, films that are focalised through children tend to attract mixed-age audiences, though they may be initially aimed at adult viewers. The searing film of Barry Hines’s novel Kes is one such; more recently, Little Voice and Billy Elliot have put a more upbeat (fairy-tale?) spin on the story of the deprived northern English child. The American comic-book heroes Batman, Superman and Spider-Man have all been adapted for film, moving from children’s reading to crossover viewing. Out of the Hollywood mainstream, Ghostworld and From Hell began life as young adult graphic novels before becoming successful young adult and adult films. Walter Moers’s two comic-strip series, Professor Schimauski and Kapt’n Blaubar, attracted a huge crossover audience in Germany, and Captain Bluebeard in particular has become an international crossover success. At 750 pages long, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear (2000) is not for the fainthearted, but the combination of Vonnegut pace and Swiftian humour is as likely to attract child as adult readers. Children’s cartoon animation developed alongside adult cinema and television shows, in many cases parasitically so. As Matt Groening put it in an episode of The Simpsons (Episode 3F16, ‘The Day the Violence Died’), ‘Animation is built on plagiarism. If it weren’t for someone plagiarising The Honeymooners, we wouldn’t have The Flintstones. If someone hadn’t ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there’d be no Top Cat.’ Recently, both South Park and The Simpsons have transformed the early evening cartoon slot into an hour of brilliantly observed social satire; The Simpsons especially is consumed addictively by adults as well as children. TV sit-coms like Friends also attract enormous mixed-age audiences. Animation films are now extremely sophisticated technically, and have developed story- lines of increasing complexity and depth. Nick Parks’s A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers turned Wallace and Gromit into favourite comic icons, for both adults and chil- dren (see Abbotson 2000). Monsters, Inc. is an inventive portrait of adult corporate identity, where the corporation is sustained by the energy (shrieks or laughter) of unwit- ting children. In many ways, the film’s satirical view of US big business is sharper and more perceptive than many adult films (The Matrix, for example). Children’s fantasy novels, in particular, are attracting film producers almost as soon as they have established substantial crossover readerships. Tolkien and Rowling are soon to be followed by film adaptations of Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor and Colfer’s Artemis Fowl. But the adaptation of children’s fiction into crossover film has such a long and illustrious history, a history that is bound up with the larger story of the development of cinema, that it can only be touched on here. The crossover appeal of contemporary picture books is a particularly interesting case, since these books have traditionally been marketed for the youngest readerships (see Scott 1999; McGillis 1999). Wegman’s photographic book Puppies is clearly aimed at child readers, but it was previewed for dual audiences in The New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the adult TV show Oprah. But experimental picture books, such as those of Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak, have done more than perhaps any other genre to call into question assumptions about what distinguishes children’s from adult literature. Myles McDowell once listed the essential characteristics of children’s literature, which included: a clear-cut moral schema, optimism, orderly plots, an emphasis on magic and adventure, use of conventions, dialogue rather than description, shorter length and simplicity (McDowell 1972/1976). Contemporary experimental picture books call into question every one of these ‘essential’ characteristics. John Burningham’s Would You Rather … (1978) is a narrative with an open ending comparable to adult experimental fiction (for example, Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman). Jon Sciesza’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1992) reinvents traditional fairy tales and comments on its own textuality, in the manner of metafic-
Crossover literature 569 tional works such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller or Spark’s The Comforters (Grieve 1998: 11). Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) and The Giving Tree (1964) are children’s picture books that are becoming adult classics in the USA. Sometimes the reference system seems aimed at the adult (parent?) reader, rather than the child. According to John Stephens, Anthony Browne’s Willie the Dreamer (1997) ‘establishes a dialogic relationship with Magritte and Dali’, which would most likely pass unnoticed by a very young child (Stephens 2000: 18). But this is not to assume that the adult reader sees more than the child (assuming the adult picks up the references to modern art at all). As Stephens points out, the child reader is often quicker to notice the complex inter- and intra-textual references which characterise Browne’s work. Some picture books are also crossover in the sense that young adult and social realist fiction is: that is, they present adult themes to child readers. In this respect, they have attracted the same kind of controversy as discussed above. This is particularly true of picture books that represent war or genocide (books on the Holocaust and Hiroshima, for example) (Harrison 1987). Judith Kerr’s ostensibly light-hearted picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) touches on the darker material of her autobiographical novel about Nazism, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) (see Sylvester 2002). Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1982) is a far from optimistic critique of the nuclear arms industry, possibly aimed at young readers. Briggs’s The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984) satirises Margaret Thatcher’s role in the Falklands War, and assumes a sophisticated level of interpretation. It would be nice to think that the current high profile of crossover books and films could be explained solely as a response to the merit of the works in question. But such crossover activity needs to be understood as part of a broader cultural context. Some argue that social and economic changes have made adults more disposed to take notice of children’s culture. Single-parent and higher-income families, working children and ‘kiddults’ may all have contributed to the dramatic rise in consumption of children’s prod- ucts. Like it or not, children in western capitalist countries are big business. And over the past twenty years, more and more young adults have become involved in the running of powerful corporations, especially in the USA. In a special issue of The Economist devoted to youth cultures in the USA, Europe and Japan, Chris Anderson charts the ‘growing influence of young adults in ‘the working world’ (Anderson 2000: 3). He identifies three factors as being chiefly responsible for the dominance of youth in new corporations like Microsoft; all three are linked in some way to the importance of new technologies in the workplace. First, the Internet ‘has triggered the first industrial revolution in history to be led by the young’; young people are growing up with technological skills that older employees have to learn, and learn more slowly (4). Michael Schrage of MIT is quoted as saying that this is the ‘age of ageism’ (8), an age in which ‘Enfantrepreneurs’ are favoured to run ‘immature technologies’ (9). Second, corporate restructurings of the 1980s and 1990s, in breaking down traditional hierarchies, placed greater value on younger employees. Since that restructuring, the most sought-after employees are not those with a record of loyal service, but ‘free agents who stay only as long as they are challenged and rewarded; flitting from job to job, once a trait of fickle youth, is now an admired sign of ambition and initiative’ (5). And finally, like sexual preference, age is becoming a matter of choice. You can opt to be young, culturally if not chronologically; at thirty-five, you can dress and behave as a twenty-year-old, listen to the same music, play the same sports, lead the same social life. New York and San Francisco are societies ‘converging on a virtual age somewhere between twenty and thirty’, and other American cities are not far behind (5).
570 Rachel Falconer Such changes in working practice may have influenced the cultural habits of an enor- mous number of people, not only their consumption of books and films but also their decisions when and whether to find full-time work, have sex, drink, use drugs, marry, have (or not have) children, in what manner to dress, eat, and socialise. In July 2000, it was estimated that 10,000 people a week in Britain were buying Sony Playstations, that the sale of small scooters went up by 31 per cent and large scooters and motorbikes by 47 per cent, and that the consumers of these products were aged anywhere from eighteen to forty (Summerskill 2000). ‘Kiddult’ clothes became high fashion, and models dressed as ‘Goldilocks’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were expected to appeal to adult consumers. Gucci sent a parade of baby-doll dresses down the catwalk; adults sported ‘Babe’ tee-shirts; sales of Reeboks and Adidas fashion trainers soared; Emma Bunton as ‘Baby Spice’ became a cultural icon; and Elspeth Gibson designed her winter 2002 collection after Lord of the Rings. And while adults regressed to ‘kiddults’, ‘chadults’ and ‘middlescents’, children aged to ‘tweenagers’, using mobile phones, reading glossy magazines like Cosmogirl for under-elevens, buying sexualised clothes, make-up and perfumes. For example, BBC 2’s Little Women documented the lives of a group of seven- to-twelve-year-old girls who shopped at Harrods, watched wrestling on Sky Sports, discussed rape and dressed like their favourite pop idols. Critical reactions to ‘kiddult’ and ‘tweenager’ cultures have been extremely mixed in Britain and continental Europe. In part, this is because the phenomenon is viewed as an export from the USA, and if within the USA youth culture is associated (correctly or not) with underground, anti-establishment movements, once it is marketed abroad it may come to stand for exactly the opposite: political conformism, global homogenisation, the erasure of cultural difference. In Britain, the reaction to crossover products and images has, again, been mixed: for example, on the negative side, some complain that children are being made to grow up too fast; others accuse adults of refusing to grow up. Thus David Aaronovitch writes, ‘I don’t like to see adults reading Harry Potter when they haven’t read Nabokov, or men on shiny scooters when they should be on foot’ (Aaronovitch 2001). According to Philip Hensher, adult nostalgia for the past is perfectly acceptable and normal; what is suspect is ‘the new and … strange phenomenon … of adults buying and reading new children’s books, which can carry no weight of nostalgia for them’ (Hensher 2001). The culture of ‘kidology’ is seen by some commentators to have infiltrated British poli- tics, with detrimental effect. For some critics kiddultery is a sign of increasing American influence on British politics and culture, but for Timothy Garton Ash it betokens a return to English public school values. Garton Ash claims that the three main British exports of 2001, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Tony Blair – all have something in common. Inside a very modern, hi-tech, movie packaging, you discover a remarkably traditional Englishness … Britain must be Gryffindor among the houses of Europe, and Harry Blair – Sir Frodo of the Shire – will lead us there. But Blair’s notions of British leader- ship in Europe seems hardly comparable either to Harry’s exuberant acrobatics in Quidditch, or Frodo’s anxious journey into Mordor. (Garton Ash 2002: 21) In fashioning a political critique of Blair, Garton Ash at the same time fuses into a single entity all the varied books and films that are consumed by children of different ages,
Crossover literature 571 interests and social groups. Thus simplified, children’s literature is made to signify, on the one hand, American cultural imperialism and, on the other, traditional English insularity. A similar range of opinions is evident in specialist academic criticism about contempo- rary crossover literature. Some critics applaud the fact that children’s literature has ‘finally come of age’, a curious phrase which, if it were accurate, would spell the end of the entity it celebrates (see Nikolajeva 1996). Others, by contrast, are worried that children’s litera- ture is disappearing under the pressures of adult consumerism. For example, Neil Postman, in The Disappearance of Childhood (1983), and Jack Zipes, in Sticks and Stones or the Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature (2002), argue that children are being dein- dividualised, or homogenised, by a bombardment of consumerist messages from TV, pop culture, games, popular films and pulp books. To my mind, Postman’s study really only proves that a certain kind of childhood (his) is disappearing, while Zipes’s stimulating collection of essays is flawed by inconsistency. In the final essay, he argues on the one hand that Harry Potter is only being bought and read by adults, not children, and on the other hand that this kind of derivative, sexist and banal book is responsible for turning children into consumerist clones. But it is hard to see how the Potter books could exert such influ- ence on children, if they are not actually reading them. In any case, both his arguments are hard to square with the fine introductory essay, which encourages academics to study not only classic children’s literature but also what contemporary children are actually reading now: from cereal packets to comic books to Playstation manuals (see also Zornado 2001). But perhaps the commonest argument recently advanced by critics, authors and publishers is that some children’s literature transcends age difference altogether; – for example, S. F. Said argues that crossover or kiddult books had – and still have – ‘the ageless resonance of myth’ (Said 2003). The claim to transcendence should be distinguished from that of crossover potential, since there must be recognised age boundaries in order for texts to cross over them. The argument that good children’s literature is ‘for all ages’ is not a new one. Many authors have maintained that they do not write specifically for children. C. S. Lewis claimed that if a book is not worth reading at sixty it is not worth reading at six, and Richard Adams insisted, ‘I do not, myself, recognise the distinction between publications for children and for adults … In my view, the distinction may do more harm than good’ (Eccleshare 2002: 90). But authorial intentions, however interesting, do not determine the relationship between readers and texts (and not all authors would agree that transcendence is some- thing to aim for). For the most part, children’s literature has attracted a distinct group of readers since at least the mid-eighteenth century. This group certainly includes adults – parents, librarians, educators, students, publishers and booksellers, writers and journalists – but it is still a group distinct from readers of mainstream ‘adult’ literature. Even these adult readers do not respond to children’s literature agelessly, any more than children do. A text may activate an adult’s ‘inner child’ or indeed any number of argumentative and mutually incompatible inner children. Equally, a text may activate a child’s ‘inner parent’, as Don Latham argues of Lois Lowry’s Annemarie, in Number the Stars (1989) and The Giver (1997) (Latham 2002: 8). Crossover books and films are interesting precisely because of the shifts and slides of temporal perspective they induce in their readers and viewers. The argument that children’s literature is for ‘all ages’ can also be framed negatively. As Jacqueline Rose points out, children’s literature is primarily written, sold, chosen, bought and consumed by adults, so it has always been only secondarily for children (Rose 1984). But children only come ‘afterwards’ in discussions of children’s literature, as she claims, if
572 Rachel Falconer we decide a priori to begin the discussion with authors and end it with readers. Rose passes over child readers in silence because, she says, their motives are not recoverable. But this is to mystify children unnecessarily, to reduce them to the status of Spivak’s subal- terns. Children can articulate their views about reading, and these views can and should be incorporated into specialist critical analysis. Moreover, in applying the familiar postcolonial and/or feminist critique of ‘Otherness’ to the arena of children’s literature, Rose fails to account for the continuum between children’s and adults’ experience, a continuum that does not exist in gender or race relations. Many children are curious about adult perspec- tives, and one reason they read books and watch films is to gain insight into adult discourses and constructions of reality – as Juliet McMaster notes, child writers don’t usually write about children, but about adult worlds (McMaster 2001: 281). From the brief survey above, it should be apparent that there are different types of crossover in different genres, and there are many different genres of literature that are currently crossing from child to adult, and adult to child audiences. Some of this traffic from one age of audience to another is new; some has ample historical precedent. But it seems certain that in recent years we have witnessed crossover literature entering a new and important phase. Adults are arguably more engaged with contemporary children’s literature than they ever have been. This engagement could become merely predatory or manipulative, as some critics fear. It could be one-sided, but it could also be the basis for a more dialogic understanding of children’s and adults’ cultures, their interdependence, and their inter-illumination. References Aaronovitch, D. (2001) ‘What’s So Smart about Being Childish?’ The Independent, 6 June. Abbotson, S. (2000) ‘Nick Park’s Ambivalent Heroes: Technology in Wallace and Gromit’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 10, 2: 36–40. Anderson, C. (2000) ‘Survey: The Young’, Bright Young Things, special issue of The Economist, 23 December. Armitt, L. (1996) Theorizing the Fantastic, London: Arnold. Baer, E. (2000) ‘A New Algorithm in Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World’, The Lion and the Unicorn 24, 4: 378–401. Bakhtin, M. (1984) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Emerson, C. and Holquist, M., Austin: University of Texas Press. Beckett, S. (1999) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland. —— (1999a) ‘Crosswriting Child and Adult in France: Children’s Fiction for Adults? Adult Fiction for Children? Fiction for All Ages?’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) (1999) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 31–62. Booth, W. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Brennan, G. (1996) ‘Painful Truths about a Violent Society’, Times Educational Supplement, 15 November: 6. Brooks, P. (1984) Reading for the Plot, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Burgess, M. (2001) ‘Why I Write about Teenage Sex’, Sunday Telegraph, 12 August. Calvino, I. (1996) Six Memos for the Next Millennium, London: Vintage. Cameron, R. (1999) ‘Watching Alice: The Child as Narrative Lens in Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 9, 3: 23–9. Cunliffe, M. (2000) ‘Reading Gulliver’s Travels as a Child and as an Adult’, in Wiener, G. (ed.) Readings on Gulliver’s Travels, San Diego: Greenhaven, 174–80. Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, A., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Crossover literature 573 Dusinberre, J. (1987) Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Eccleshare, J. (2002) Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter: Portraits of Children’s Writers, London: National Portrait Gallery Publications. Fisher, M. (1986) The Bright Face of Danger, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Garton Ash, T. (2002) Guardian, ‘Comment and Analysis’, 7 February. Grenz, D. (1988) ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann as an Author for Children and Adults or the Child and the Adult Reader of Children’s Literature’, Phaedrus 13: 91–6. Grieve, A. (1998) ‘Metafictional Play in Children’s Fiction’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 8, 3: 5–15. Guardian Leader (2001) ‘Literary Expansion: Children’s Books Break through the Barrier’, Guardian, 18 August. Harrison, B. (1987) ‘Howl like the Wolves’, Children’s Literature 15: 67–9. Hensher, P. (2001) ‘When Adults Want to Become Children Again’, Independent, ‘Home’, 16 June. IRSCL (1987) ‘Papers of the Eighth International IRSCL Conference, Cologne, 1987: Books for Children – Books for Adults: The Relationship between Them’, Fundevogel 41–2. Irving, I. (1996) ‘A Look at YA/Cross-Over Novels’, Magpie 11, 2: 49–50. Jackson, M. (1989) Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839, Aldershot: Scolar. Joughin, S. (2002) ‘Childish Things’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 February. Kareland, L. (1999) ‘Two Crosswriting Authors: Carl Sandburg and Lennart Hellsing’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 215–38. Knoepflmacher, U. C. (2002) ‘The Critic as Former Child: A Personal Narrative’, Papers: Explo- rations into Children’s Literature 12, 1: 5–9. Koehnecke, D. (2000) ‘Smoky Night and Crack: Controversial Subjects in Current Children’s Stories’, Children’s Literature in Education 32, 1: 17–30. Kooistra, L. J. (1997) ‘Goblin Market as a Cross-Audienced Poem: Children’s Fairy Tale, Adult Erotic Fantasy’, Children’s Literature 25, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 181–204. Lacan, J. (1984) Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Davis, R. C., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Latham, D. (2002) ‘Childhood in the Books of Lois Lowry’, The Lion and the Unicorn 26, 1: 1–15. McDowell, M. (1972/1976) ‘Fiction for Children and Adults: Some Essential Differences’, Chil- dren’s Literature in Education 51; reprinted in Fox, G., Hammond, G. and Jones, T. (eds) Writers, Critics and Children, London: Heinemann. McGillis, R. (1999) ‘ “Ages All”: Readers, Texts and Intertexts in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 111–26. McMaster, J. (2001) ‘ “Adults’ Literature” – by Children’, The Lion and the Unicorn 25, 2: 277–99. Magrs, P. (2002) ‘Stranger than Fiction’, Scotland on Sunday, 11 August. Myers, M. and Knoepflmacher, U. C. (1997) ‘ “Cross-Writing” and the Reconceptualizing of Chil- dren’s Literary Studies’, Children’s Literature 25, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Myerson, J. (2002) ‘High Anxiety’, Guardian, ‘Review’, 23 March. Nikolajeva, M. (1996) Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Towards a New Aesthetic, New York and London: Garland. O’Brien, C. (2002) ‘Nice Smile. Enid Blyton She Isn’t’, Times Educational Supplement, 25 February. Poeti, A. (1999) ‘Crossing Borders: Calvino in the Footprints of Collodi’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Tran- scending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 201–14. Postman, N. (1983) The Disappearance of Childhood, London: W. H. Allen.
574 Rachel Falconer Ricoeur, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. McLaughlin, K. and Pellauer, D., Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, London: Macmillan. Rosenberg, T. (2001) ‘Magical Realism and Children’s Literature: Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a Test Case’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 11, 1: 14–25. Rushdie, S. (1992) The Wizard of Oz, London: BFI Publishing. Russell, D. (2002) ‘YA Fairy Tales for the New Age: Francesca Lia Block’s The Rose and the Beast’, Children’s Literature in Education 33, 2: 107–15. Said, S. F. (2002) ‘The Godfather of Harry Potter’, Daily Telegraph, ‘Arts’, 8 December. —— (2003) ‘The Grown Up World of Kidult Books’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January. Scott, C. (1999) ‘Dual Audience in Picture Books’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 99–110. Shavit, Z. (1986) Poetics of Children’s Literature, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Spufford, F. (2002) The Child That Books Built, London: Faber and Faber. Stephens, J. (2000) ‘Children’s Literature, Text and Theory: What Are We Interested in Now?’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 10, 2: 12–21. Summerskill, B. (2000) ‘Playtime as Kidults Grow Up at Last’, Observer, ‘Focus’, 23 July. Sylvester, L. (2002) ‘A Knock at the Door: Reading Judith Kerr’s Picture Books in the Context of Her Holocaust Fiction’, The Lion and the Unicorn 26, 1: 16–30. Todorov, T. (1993) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tumanov, L. K. (1999) ‘Writing for a Dual Audience in the Former Soviet Union’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 129–48. van Lierop-Debrawer, H. (1999) ‘Crossing the Border: Authors Do It, But Do Critics? The Recep- tion of Dual-Readership Authors in the Netherlands’, in Beckett, S. (ed.) Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland, 3–12. Walden, G. (2003) ‘A Child’s Point of View’, Sunday Telegraph, 26 January. Wall, B. (1991) The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction, London: Macmillan. White, M. (2001) Tolkien: A Biography, London: Abacus. Wilson, A. N. (1991) C. S. Lewis: A Biography, London: Flamingo. Wojcik-Andrews, I. (2002) Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory, New York and London: Garland. Zipes, J. (2002) Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, London: Routledge. Zornado, J. (2001) Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology and the Story of Childhood, London and New York: Garland. Further reading Ang, S. (2000) The Widening World of Children’s Literature, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Apseloff, M. F. (1989) They Wrote for Children Too: An Annotated Bibliography of Children’s Litera- ture by Famous Writers for Adults, Westport: Greenwood Press. Cirella-Urrutia, A. (2000) ‘The “Childification” of Adulthood in Aurand Harris’s Punch and Judy’, Bookbird 38, 1: 42–4. Galef, D. (1995) ‘Crossing over: Authors Who Write Both Children’s and Adults’ Fiction’, Chil- dren’s Literature Association Quarterly 20, 1: 29–35. McGavran, J. H. (ed.) (1999) Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contes- tations, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. McGillis, R. (1996) The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature, New York: Twayne.
Crossover literature 575 Nodelman, P. (1996) The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, New York: Longman. Rosen, J. (1997) ‘Breaking the Age Barrier’, Publishers’ Weekly, 9 August. Ruddick, N. (ed.) (1992) State of the Fantastic, Greenwich: Greenwood Press. Zipes, J. (2003) Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, London: Macmillan.
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